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"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER 

A SELECTION OF SOLDIERS' 
LETTERS, 1914-1918 



WITH COMMENT BY 

N P. DAWSON 



I3eto gorfe 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1918 

A.U rights reserved 



t* 



p 



Copyright, 1918 
Bt THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and clectrotyped. Published June, 1918. 



JUL -3 1218 



©CLA501051 



-Wo I 



Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for 

honor, 
Not since her birth has our Earth seen such worth 

loosed upon her. 

— Rudyard Kipling. 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/thegoodsoldierseOOdaws 



INTRODUCTION 

Here are boys, all sorts of boys: French, English 
Italian, American; young artists, budding novelists 
and poets; musicians; drab and spectacled London 
office clerks just off a stool; an auctioneer from Brix- 
ton; elderly married men, as old as thirty-five, and 
" little nephews " of sixteen ; Catholics, Protestants, 
Christians, Jews; grave young students in arms; 
Crusaders of France; Oxford and Cambridge men 
and French schoolboys; American college men and 
American rich men's sons from New York and Cali- 
fornia; a ball-player from Kentucky; " those splen- 
did Canadians " ; favorites of fortune and widows' 
sons; French prisoners in Germany, and German 
prisoners in France, and little Antonio in Austria 
looking longingly out across the sea to Italy; avia- 
tors, ambulance drivers, truck drivers, stretcher- 
bearers, gunners; plucky British officers willing to 
" bear the blunt " ; and dashing young Saint-Cyriens 
going into battle in white gloves and plume — the 
" elite of the world," the new aristocracy, not wait- 
ing to see or be summoned, but, at the first call to 
arms, rushing forth, as Kipling writes, " as jostling 
for honor." 

These are soldiers' letters written home. But 
reading, one finds that he does not think of them as 



viii INTRODUCTION 

letters at all, but as boys: Enzo, Antonio, Robert, 
Arthur, Gaston, William, Marcel, Harry, Victor. 
And one is filled with pity that they are boys, " mere 
men " as more than one of them says, pitted against 
professional soldiers, experts in the refined arts of 
modern war. But if one thing more than another 
is revealed in the letters, it is that the writers do 
not want to be pitied ; rather envied. One boy tells 
his parents (an American, by his speech) not, with 
their worrying, to " take the edge off " from his 
own complete contentment with what he is doing. 
A French boy says not to call him " poor Jean " ; 
rather to say " dear Jean " or " brave Jean " or even 
" little Jean," but not " poor Jean." All express in 
one way and another that death has no terrors for 
" the good soldier." 

Never probably in the history of the world have 
so many letters been written as during the great 
war. At the front, it is said that the most impor- 
tant order of the day is not a trench raid, a gas 
attack, or a big bombardment, but, first, food, and 
next the mail. At home, the mail would probably 
be put first. Many of the letters reveal not only 
an unexpected literary talent, since most of the writ- 
ers are very young, but invariably a wonderful 
spirit: the spirit of " the good soldier" quick fo re- 
sent injustice and wrong, eager to fight for what he 
believes is right, and willing to die for it, too. 

No one can read the letters of these glorious boys 
and not resent the belittling assumption that all the 
fighting men are dumb victims of a " capitalistic " 
war, driven against their will. Nor can one believe 



INTRODUCTION ix 

it is adventure alone calling to youth. A few, here 
and there, to be sure, may have been like the " little 
nephew,'* the sixteen-year-old French boy, who 
thought the firing and the guns especially arranged 
to "please me!" But almost without exception, 
no matter in what spirit they entered the war, once 
in it, they become gravely conscious of its great is- 
sues, and are determined not only to do their bit, 
but their all, and see it through. 

Some of the boys fight for Mamma; others for 
grandmother (this means Alsace) ; others fight, with 
the bayonet, to avenge the honor of the " French 
women, our sisters." Some rush to the assault 
shouting " Savoia " ; others " Vive la France ! " 
But all are only varying expressions of the same 
thing. There is unanimity of opinion, no matter 
what the language, that they are engaged in a war 
against war itself; a war for freedom and justice 
not only for one's own country but for every one; 
a war, as one young Italian poetically puts it, against 
those who would " kill the light." 

In every collection of letters that has been pub- 
lished, among much that is personal and boyish — 
and at times is manifestly the supreme literary effort 
of a young life — there is generally one letter more 
sober than the rest, and serious beyond the years 
of the writer. Such a letter is not necessarily a 
conscious "last word" (boys do not like a fuss), 
but something written in a more solemn mood, per- 
haps dimly prescient. These letters are most often 
addressed to mothers, and, oddly enough, endeavor 
to give rather than to seek comfort. " These are 



x INTRODUCTION 

the days when men should be born without moth- 
ers," one writes; but another says more truly that, 
on the contrary, these are the days when mothers 
should be proud, as Spartan mothers. 

On the battle line, it is said a soldier derives com- 
fort and courage from contact with his fellows, the 
touch of shoulder and elbow. In the same manner, 
it has seemed that some of these letters should be 
brought in a volume together. They belong to- 
gether. The enemy may extend its empire over the 
world, sweep it from sea to sea, but the spirit of these 
letters cannot be defeated. The dead will rise 
again. 

N. P. D. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Enzo Valentini I 

An Anonymous Soldier ...... 5 

Antonio 9 

Robert Le Roux 12 

Gaston Riou 16 

A German Prisoner in France .... 20 

Arthur George Heath 22 

Obsever B de P 27 

" God Punish England! " 30 

Pierre-Maurice Masson 33 

Coningsby Dawson 38 

A Saint-Cyrien 41 

Robert Ernest Vernede 45 

Andre Cornet-Auquier 49 

Marcel Eteve 52 

The Soldier Priest 56 

Robert Hertz 62 

Decorated 65 

Alan Seeger 67 

Dixon Scott 70 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Ferdinand Belmont . . . . w w . 73 

" One Young Man " . . . . . . . 77 

Alexander Douglas Gillespie . . ... ... 79 

Harry Butters 83 

" A Temporary Gentleman " .... 87 

Norman Prince 90 

Victor Chapman 93 

Alfred Eugene Casalis 97 

" R. A. L.," Canadian Stretcher-Bearer . 100 

" My Little Nephew " 104 

Jean Rival 106 

Leslie Buswell 108 

William Yorke Stevenson no 

"Camion Letters" 114 

A French Mrs. Bixby 117 

A Little Mother 118 

Jean Giraudoux 121 

Yvonne X 124 

Charles Peguy 127 

Louis Keene 130 

Captain Gilbert Nobbs 133 

Wounded 137 

Humphrey Cobb 140 

Edmund Yerbury Priestman . . . .143 

The Marseillaise 148 

Donald Hankey 150 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

A French Schoolboy 152 

William M. Barber 154 

Vive L'Alsace ! 157 

Maurice Genevoix 159 

R. Derby Holmes 161 

Alexander McClintock 163 

Robert Reaser 165 

Arthur Guy Empey 168 

" The Good Soldier " 171 

" Pages Actuelles " 173 

A. Letter of a French Mother . . .173 

B. Letter of an American Mother . .173 

C. Farewell of a French Soldier . . .174 

D. Farewell of an American Soldier . .175 
Poem " Lament," by Wilfrid Gibson . .177 



THE GOOD SOLDIER" 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

ENZO VALENTINI 

It must be that some of the ecstasy and beautiful 
and poetic spirit of St. Francis of Assisi entered 
into a boy of the neighboring hill-top town of Pe- 
rugia. Enzo Valentini was the son of Count Val- 
entini, mayor of Perugia. He was a student of the 
College of Perugia, and was rarely gifted. A lover 
of poetry and the natural sciences, he read Fabre 
and Maeterlinck. He was also an artist. One of 
his last etchings showing some trees, he called 
" The Survivors " — not realizing that in Belgium 
and France not even the trees survive. 

Upon Italy's declaration of war in May, 19 15, 
Enzo Valentini enlisted as a private. He was un- 
willing to wait for anything else to be arranged. 
He was eighteen. He immediately entered into 
the life of the barracks. He refused to return 
home at night as he would have been permitted to 
do. His one passionate desire was to " train my 
body and elevate my soul for the great sacrifice." 

After he had been two days in the barracks, he 
wrote to his aunt: " Barracks life has transformed 
me. In two days I have become accustomed to 
everything: to sleep on straw between two double- 
bass performers, to wash the mess tins, to drill and 
1 



2 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

handle the gun. I have become accustomed to the 
most heterogeneous company and to the greatest as- 
sortment of smells a susceptible nose could possibly 
imagine. Moreover, now that I have adapted my- 
self to it, the military life suits me very well. The 
vin ordinaire is excellent, for example. The bread 
is also very good; cut into thin small pieces and 
swimming in the tin, it reminds me of pigeon soup. 
The pigeon is lacking, but I imagine it so well that 
the effect is the same. In the same way, I imagine 
that the coffee is well sweetened, that the half empty 
straw mattress serving me as a couch is a bed of 
down, and more of the same sort. Imagination 
makes me happy, aided by enthusiasm that has be- 
come my regular disposition instead of an occasional 
and foolish exhilaration. Your letter has given me 
the greatest pleasure; one sees with how much love 
you accompany me. But your compliments are ex- 
aggerated. I deserve no credit for what I have 
done. It is the joy of my soul that I have trans- 
lated into acts, and not the melancholy product of 
my brain. Soon I shall be writing you from the 
front." 

When two months have passed since " dead with 
fatigue and drunk with joy," he arrived at the front, 
he writes to his mother that it seems as if it were 
only yesterday, and that searching his conscience, he 
finds that he has lost nothing, unless it is little mean- 
nesses and cowardices, while he has gained inestim- 
able spiritual treasures. He is sure that he has dis- 
covered the secret of happiness. " I am happy, 
little mother, and I think that I have found the 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 3 

secret of being happy always." He tells her not to 
worry for fear he will rush into any foolish " hero- 
isms." He says: " That would be wrong, because 
it would consume the energy that should be saved 
for the moment of the ultimate sacrifice." 

He left Perugia in July. He never returned. In 
less than three months he was killed. In the attack 
in which he lost his life, it is said he was the first 
out of the trench. Arriving at an advanced posi- 
tion, he and one of his comrades embraced each other. 
He showed his friend his cap in which he had put a 
sprig of edelweiss. He said when he jumped out of 
the trench, he saw it at his feet. '" Isn't it pretty? " 
he asked. " It will bring me luck." Then shouting 
"Italia! Savoia! " he went on. He was hit by 
five bullets. 

Before departing for the front, Enzo Valentini 
made his will and testament, to be opened only in 
the case of his death, the last poetic words of which 
are: " Be strong, little mother. From beyond, he 
sends to you his farewell, to papa, to his brothers, 
to all who have loved him — your son who has given 
his body to fight against those who would kill the 
light." 

{Letter of Enzo Valentini) 

Little mother, in several days I am going to de- 
part for the front. I am writing my farewell to 
you, which you are to read only if I die. Let it also 
be my farewell to papa, to my brothers, to all those 
who have cared for me in this world. 



4 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

Since on earth my heart, in its love and recogni- 
tion, has always to you given its best thoughts, it is 
to you also that I wish to make known my last 
wishes. . . . 

Try, if you can, not to weep for me too much. 
Think that even if I do not return, I am not for 
that reason dead. It, my body, the inferior part of 
me, may suffer and die, but not I. I, the soul, can- 
not die, because I come from God and must return 
to God. I was born for happiness, and through the 
happiness that is at the bottom of all suffering, I 
am to return into everlasting joy. If at times I 
have been the prisoner of my body, it has not been 
for always. My death is a liberation, the beginning 
of the true life, the return to the Infinite. There- 
fore, do not weep for me. If you think of the im- 
mortal beauty of the Ideas for which my soul has 
desired to sacrifice my body, you will not weep. 
But if your mother's heart mourns, let the tears 
flow. They will always be sacred, the tears of a 
mother. May God keep count of them; they wili 
be the stars of her crown. 

" Un Heros italien de la grande guerre," par Francesco 
Picco: Revue politique et litter aire. 



AN ANONYMOUS SOLDIER 

The letters of an unnamed soldier to his mother are 
literature. The young soldier was a painter, but 
the war made him a poet. It is doubtful if he ever 
would have painted pictures more beautiful than 
many in these letters : " Soft weather after rain. 
Bells in the evening; flowing waters singing under 
the bridges; trees settling to sleep." He writes to 
his mother: " There were three of us: we two and 
the pretty landscape from my window. ,, 

This French soldier cannot bring himself to write 
about the horrors of the war. He prefers to con- 
sider " the certainties the tempest has made clear to 
me." These certainties, from which he never 
swerves, are " duty and effort." After five days of 
horror, in which bis company was cut to pieces, 1 ,200 
were killed, not a superior officer remained above 
him, and his captain fell before his eyes just as he 
was telling him he would report him for citation — 
the most he has to tell is that he has done his duty. 

His whole effort is to raise his soul where events 
can have no empire over it. " We must feel," he 
writes to his mother, " that all human uprooting is a 
little thing, and what is truly ourselves is the life of 
the soul. . . . Nothing attacks the soul." Although 
" we lead the life of rabbits on the first day of the 



6 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

season's shooting, notwithstanding that, we can en- 
rich our souls in a magnificent way." 

An Englishman, A. Clutton-Brock, says of these 
letters that before the war — not comprehending so 
well then — an Anglo-Saxon would have said of 
them that they are " very French " ; that is to say, 
very unlike what an Englishman (or an Ameri- 
can) would write to his mother, or indeed to any 
one. An Englishman having the same abhorrence 
of war as this Frenchman, Mr. Clutton-Brock says, 
would be a conscientious objector. But although he 
uses the words " torment " and " sacrifice " in con- 
nection with himself in the war, he is in it of his 
own free will — and for all his soul's worth. 

One of the first letters says: "Know that it 
would be shameful to think for one instant of hold- 
ing back when the race demands the sacrifice." And 
again: " If you knew the shame I should endure to 
think that I might have done something more." 
" O, my beautiful country, the heart of the world," 
he apostrophizes France in many beautiful passages, 
and says it needed only " the horror " to make him 
know " how filial and profound are the ties " which 
bind him to it. 

Only once is he plainly rebellious — and then, 
oddly enough, he is most human and appealing. 
" But, oh dearest mother, the war is long, too long 
for men who had something else to do in the 
world ! " But even then he is not like Jephthah's 
daughter who asked " for a brief respite to bewail 
her youth." " No, no," he writes, " I will not 
mourn over my dead youth." And he recognizes the 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 7 

duty of " accepting the mission in life that presents 
itself." Only he would have liked to have been one 
of the torch-bearers, to have carried the flag. 

The French soldier has not been heard of since 
one of the severe battles in the Argonne, in April, 
1 91 5. Since he himself is thus one of the missing, 
it is significant to find him writing to his mother, in 
one of his many efforts to have them make their grief, 
and even their love, impersonal, the following: " I 
hope that when you think of me, you will have in 
mind all those who have left everything behind; 
their family, their surroundings, their whole social 
environment; all those of whom their nearest and 
dearest think only in the past, saying, ' We had once 
a brother, who many years ago, withdrew from the 
world ; we know nothing of his fate.' ,: The words 
may serve as an epitaph. 

{Letter of Anonymous French Soldier) 

January 23, 1915. 
When my trials become less hard, then I begin to 
think, to dream, and the past that is dear to me seems 
to have that same remote poetry which in happier 
days drew my thoughts to distant countries. A 
familiar street, or certain well-known corners, 
spring suddenly to my mind — just as in other days 
islands of dreams and legendary countries used to 
rise at the call of certain music and verse. But 
now there is no need of verse or music ; the intensity 
of dear memories is enough. 



8 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

I have not even any idea of what a new life could 
be; I only know that we are making life here and 
now. 

For whom and for what age? It hardly matters. 
What I do know, and what is affirmed in the very 
depths of my being, is that this harvest of French 
genius will be safely stored, and that the intellect 
of our race will not suffer for the deep cuts that 
have been made in it. 

Who will say that the rough peasant, comrade of 
the fallen thinker, will not be the inheritor of his 
thoughts. No experience can falsify this magnifi- 
cent intuition. The peasant's son who has wit- 
nessed the death of the young scholar or artist will 
perhaps take up the interrupted work, be perhaps a 
link in the chain of evolution which has been for 
the moment suspended. This is the real sacrifice: 
to renounce the hope of being the torch-bearer. 
To a child in a game it is a fine thing to carry the 
flag; but for a man it is enough to know that the 
flag will be carried. 

And that is what every moment of august Nature 
brings home to me. Every moment reassures my 
heart : Nature makes flags of everything. They are 
more beautiful than those to which our little habits 
cling. 

" Letters of a Soldier." With an Introduction by A. 
CI utton -Brock and a Preface by Andre Chevrillon. Au- 
thorized translation by V. M. Printed by T. and A. Con- 
stable at the Edinburgh University Press. 



ANTONIO 

There was a cripple in Rome. His name was En- 
rico Toti. He was a familiar figure in the Tras- 
tevere quarter, where he made little wooden toys 
and sold them. Insisting upon going to the front, 
he was at first employed only as a messenger. But 
it was not long before he was fighting. When he 
was finally mortally wounded, he cried " Viva 
l'ltalia! Viva Trieste! Viva il Bersagliere! " and 
he hurled his crutch in the direction of the enemy 
as he fell. 

Many of the Italian letters have this heroic qual- 
ity, to less impressionable Anglo-Saxon minds it may 
even seem theatric and familiarly operatic. Most of 
the letters are frankly nationalistic. Their rallying 
cry is " Savoia! " " We shout unceasingly ' Savoia! 
Savoia! > " one of the soldiers writes. The light 
gleaming on the towers of Trieste is their shining 
goal. The war for Italy is another war of Italian 
independence — the fourth. It is the opportunity 
to destroy once and for all time the reputation of the 
Italians as a nation of mandolin players, existing for 
no other purpose than to serenade and amuse the rest 
of the world. "No! No! We will not be a 
museum, a hotel, a winter resort, a horizon painted 
in Prussian blue for international honeymoons! " 
D'Annunzio said in one of his fiery speeches. 



io "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

Some of the letters of the Italians are almost child- 
like in their naivete and simple faith; others have a 
wider vision, and all have this note of heroism. A 
sailor writes to his mother: " But thou must not 
weep, because one weeps over the tomb of a son who 
dies, not over that of a soldier who falls in the 
sacred battle." The " Mama mia " of a letter writ- 
ten by a young Italian prisoner of the dreaded 
Austrians is as poignant as the similar cry of Tur- 
ridu in Mascagni's little music drama. It has the 
essence of poetry. 

(Letter of Antonio, prisoner of the Austrians) 

O Mamma mia, if you could see to what your 
son is reduced ! . . . They have sent me here to dig 
trenches on the shore of the sea, and when we can 
do no more they beat us, and the other day two of 
our number died. O my Mother, I pray you on 
my knees go every day to the church and pray for 
your son to the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary, and 
to our great protector, Saint Anthony, because they 
alone possess the grace to save thy poor son who is 
dying of hunger and weakness, for one works fifteen 
hours a day and they give us to eat three boiled 
potatoes, and then many beatings. 

The other day a fisherman gave me two fishes and 
I ate them raw, which at one time would have filled 
me with disgust, but when there is hunger, every- 
thing is good. 

Yesterday I was thinking so much of my dear 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" n 

country and of my mother that many tears fell from 
my eyes, and the sergeant of the guard gave me a 
kick and wished to throw me into the sea. Oh, 
Mamma mia, when the weather is fine, I see far, 
far away across the sea, a strip of land which they 
have told me is Italy, and I wished to throw myself 
into the sea and swim to return to my dear country. 
But the sea is so deep, deep, and I do not know how 
to swim, and I can do nothing but weep, when I 
see how many of my companions are dying. . . . 

O dear mother, I wish that I could close my eyes 
for always, so that I could not see any more of this 
wretchedness, but I think of thee and of my dear 
country, and of the hearth where we sat to tell 
stories, and I think of Angiolina whom I love so 
well, and whom I have promised to marry. And 
now I pray so much to the Blessed Virgin of the 
Rosary and to our Lord Jesus, who has had thorns 
on His head and has suffered so greatly, that He 
will give me strength to support this anguish. And 
also, thou, my mother, pray for thy dear son that he 
may not close his eyes in this inferno, and that he 
may return home safe and sound. Keep w T ell, my 
mother, and receive many kisses and embraces from 
thy unhappy prisoner son. Farewell, farewell — 
Thy son Antonio. 

Taken by permission from " We of Italy," by Klyda 
Richardson Steege. Published by E. P. Dutton & Com- 
pany. 



ROBERT LE ROUX 

Hugues Le Roux, one of the editors of the Matin 
in Paris, and French man of letters well known in 
this country, lost his only son in the early days of 
the war. Robert Le Roux's first letter is dated 
August 2, 19 14, which shows that he was in at the 
beginning. His parting words to his father were: 
" You know that I shall do my duty, and a little 
more if I have the chance." 

He did the little more. He received his death 
wound at the first contact with the enemy, while 
leading his men in an heroic charge. On September 
26, 19 14, M. Le Roux received a letter from his son 
in hospital which said: " I have been wounded in 
the arm, but that is nothing. Another bullet passed 
through the lungs; the spine is bad. This is tire- 
some, for my legs are paralyzed. But they tell me 
that, as the wound is a clean one, I shall recover. 
That is all. I am able to write you owing to the 

kindness of Mr. N , one of the officials of the 

hospital." The signature of the letter was un- 
steady, and enclosed was a note from " Mr. N " 

saying he had written at the boy's dictation, and 
that he had no chance. 

The young sub-lieutenant had kept his diary until 
a few days before he fell on the field of honor. In 

12 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 13 

his last hours, while the paralysis was creeping to- 
wards his heart, he told his father the rest of the 
story, which M. Le Roux wrote down exactly as he 
told it, under pretence of sending to his fiancee. 
Just before he died, the boy raised up in his bed and 
cried out, almost violently, as his father says, " Come, 
come ! She is bigger now, is she not ? " And when 
his father asked " Who is bigger," he made a su- 
preme effort, and said " France! " 

(Letter of Robert Le Roux) 

You know as well as I do that the instinctive 
moment at such a time doesn't carry you forward. 
I thought of you, of Mamma, of Guy, of Marie- 
Rose, and of Helen. I said to you in my heart: 
"It is for you ! " — and then, my eyes closed, I 
plunged forward! 

The wood was behind us. We were crawling in 
the open. 

You know the maneuver: the moment there is a 
lull, you bound forward on all fours. I was in the 
midst of my men. We advanced as though we were 
swimming. 

The horizon was hidden by a hilltop which at 
about three hundred meters from us rose up against 
the sky. The Germans, who were entrenched be- 
hind the slope, had plenty of time to take good aim 
at us as though we were so many hares started 
up. , . , 



i 4 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

I did not stop to count those who fell. I cried 
out: ''Closer! Closer!" — and I threw myself 
ahead of the men to encourage them. Thus bound- 
ing on, in a series of leaps, we covered about two 
hundred meters, and started to crawl up the slope. 
At each move my section was thinning out, but the 
men followed me. . . . 

One grows accustomed to everything. . . . 

Now it seemed as though the bullets were not in- 
tended for me. I could see myself at the top of the 
hill already. . . . 

I opened my mouth to call out again: " Onward, 
my boys!" — when a column of earth and dust 
passed over us and glued us to the ground. The 
Boches had brought up their machine guns. In ad- 
dition, the rain was rattling down. . . . 

I threw off the earth that had fallen on me. I 
seized by his shoulders a soldier lying on my right. 
I did the same for a man on my left, and the others 
— they did not move. They stared at me with their 
poor eyes. I could not tell whether they had been 
killed or had died of fright. 

For a moment I was in despair. This was not 
what they had pledged me. I stood up in the hail- 
ing bullets and shouted with all my strength : " If 
I am killed, it is your fault ! — But as long as you 
lie there, I shall remain standing! "... 

They roused themselves; again we moved for- 
ward. . . . 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 15 

I thought to myself: The sergeant won't come 
back and the major is dying. I must go to them 
and lose no time about it, otherwise I shall not know 
whether he wants me to go across the hill. 

So I got up, and in order to hasten matters, in- 
stead of creeping over the ground, I ran toward my 
chief. I did not go far. . . . 

Taken by permission from " On the Field of Honor," 
by Hugues Le Roux. Translated by Mrs. John Van Vorst. 
Published by Houghton Mifflin & Company. 



GASTON RIOU 

I greet you, sentinel, on the bridge of Europe, 

Live bird in your vines, lark in your field. 

Cock singing at dawn of the centuries on your farm; 

And as a peasant entering the hall 

Out of respect for the masters of the house 

And that he may not soil the finely waxed floor 

Carefully removes his boots and holds them in his hand, 

So in your honor, O France, I put aside 

The heavy perturbation of my spirit; 

The gaze with which I look upon you shall be clear, 

My eyes shall look with love, O cherished country ! 

O ancient wisdom built up century after century; 
O courage of the world, heart of the West, 
Nation inventive, intelligent, O Living One — 
Republic, I hail you by your glorious name. 

— Henri Franck, quoted by Pierre de Lanux. 

In one year, Gaston Riou went on an official mis- 
sion to Germany. He visited its principal cities and 
met and talked with its principal scholars and fore- 
most men, including, among many others, a cousin of 
the former chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg. The 
following year Gaston Riou was squatting, as he 
writes, in the dark corner of a crypt, hungry, thirsty, 
stupefied. He was a prisoner of w r ar in a Bavarian 
fortress. He was in Fort Orfr" eleven months, and 
had time to think of the many talks of the year 
before, when the Germans, almost unanimously, had 
16 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 17 

told him that the future was Germany's who would 
succeed " the aged and dying France." 

Gaston Riou, as it happened, was one of the 
young Frenchmen who thought otherwise, who be- 
lieved passionately in the France of to-morrow. 
M. Emile Faguet writes of Riou: " His ardor, his 
fire, his impetus, the rush of his blood, are all in- 
stinct with the passion of patriotism." The year 
before the war, in 19 13, he had written a book 
called " Aux Ecoutes de la France qui vient," in 
which he said some things that were later to be re- 
garded prophecy: that "a splendid to-morrow 
worthy of the finest epochs of our history is now 
germinating in the furrows of the motherland." 
The book was widely discussed, and Karl Lamp- 
recht, the Pan-German historian, delivered two lec- 
tures on it. It is dedicated to the Italian historian, 
Ferrero. 

Gaston Riou was one of the first to go to the war. 
He took part in the fighting in Lorraine and was 
mentioned in the dispatches. His entire division 
was wiped out. He was wounded and taken 
prisoner in the battle of Dieuze, the little Lorraine 
town where only the week before a joyous welcome 
had been given to the French. Pay for a book! 
" Oh, Monsieur, I could not take money from a 
French soldier! " Instead, the girl gave him a gob- 
let of Moselle. 

In Riou's letters and diary, prison fare is the chief 
topic. He says : " It seems strange to a man who 
believed himself to live on ideas to be reduced to 
become nothing but a stomach." He tells of the 



18 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

" cheese evenings," when the half of a Gruyere 
cheese was the entire dinner for four hundred and 
eighty men. But the prisoners are cheerful, and 
when the Russians arrive, they not only share with 
them, but scrub them ! And the Russians are grate- 
ful. The men formed in line to receive their ra- 
tions. The procession lasted an hour, " as at a 
great funeral." The " frivolous and impious " 
Frenchmen, as they hold out their basins, say " The 
Holy Water," for the soup; and "the handful of 
earth " for the three ounces of meat. 

{Letter of Gaston Riou) 

. . . But imprisonment is above all things hun- 
ger, chronic hunger. Those only who have experi- 
enced it can understand the effect which chronic 
hunger speedily exercises even upon an active brain. 
At first it induces hallucinations. With terrible 
realism, the sufferer recalls meals eaten before the 
war, some particular dinner, such and such a picnic. 
The nerves of taste and smell, exasperated by the 
scanty regimen, are visited by memories of odors and 
tastes. The man thinks of nothing but eating. 
Literally he is nothing but a clamorous stomach. 
He will lie awake the entire night thinking only of 
this : " What can I do to-morrow morning to se- 
cure a supplementary loaf? 

Little Brissot, my friend of the Alpine infantry, 
when we were walking a few days ago, with our two 
medical officers, made the unexpected confession: 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 19 

" Only one thing can give me pleasure now — to 
get food. Only one man interests me — the man 
who is capable of getting me food." 

This calm declaration from one so highly cul- 
tured that he will distract his mind from the cares 
of important business by reading James and Berg- 
son, from one intimately acquainted with Mon- 
taigne and the Lake poets, seemed to us neither para- 
doxical, nor irrelevant, nor cynical. 

. . . Our rations are dwindling. This morn- 
ing the quartermaster delivered to the kitchen staff 
so scanty an allowance of coffee and roasted barley 
that it hardly seemed to darken the water in our 
eight cauldrons. On Sunday each man had to be 
content with iVz oz. of semolina at midday, and 
with 2 A oz. of vermicelli in the evening. And what 
are we to think of this heap of potatoes on the 
ground at my feet ? Is it intended to feed five hun- 
dred men or one section? — It is hardly an exag- 
geration to say we are starving. . . . 

. . . Our dietary is still further reduced. To- 
day we had some horrible little prunes, two years old 
and hard as wood, in lieu of meat. . . . 



" The Diary of a French Private," by Gaston Riou. 
Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. London: George 
Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 



A GERMAN PRISONER IN FRANCE 

The British Tommies have been accused of making 
pets of their German prisoners, immediately putting 
cigarettes into their mouths and buying food and 
drink for them. A letter written by a young Ger- 
man prisoner to his mother also pays fine tribute to 
the French care of the German prisoners and 
wounded. Owing to his great love for the Father- 
land, the German prisoner tells his mother that his 
heart had " wavered and struggled," up to the mo- 
ment when it " was conquered by this eternal recog- 
nition that I owe to the country that has taken in 
the wounded that their countrymen left on the 
ground to die like dogs." The letter is quoted by 
M. Ernest Daudet, and has been stored away in 
the great and growing " Documents for the History 
of the War." 

{Letter of a German Prisoner in France) 

... I spent the whole day of Thursday, Septem- 
ber 10, and the night of Thursday to Friday, on the 
battlefield, wrapped in a ragged coat ; on Friday aft- 
ernoon, I was carried to the schoolhouse, converted 
into a field hospital. 

You will permit me, dear parents, not to narrate 
20 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 21 

to you the manner in which we were abandoned at 
the time of the retreat of our army. It's a bad 
business, take my word for it! and far from being 
to the honor of the German Red Cross which, I 
think, will not in the future be able to glory in its 
conduct on the battlefield. Who knows? But 
you can believe me, the sensations of war are terri- 
ble, as for example, to awake one morning and see 
yourself surrounded by French — and then with 
nothing more to do! At the military hospital at 
Bourges, as also at Bar-le-Duc, we were the object 
of the most assiduous and eager attention. I know 
your heart, my dear mamma, I know how good you 
are. Go then also to relieve the misery of the poor 
French wounded, and do for them as much good 
as you can. Yes, do it, I beg you, in recognition 
of what in France they have done for your son . . . 
it occurs to me that there are some French books 
at home ; give them, I beg you, for me, to the French 
wounded, who must be mortally dull, a prey to a 
terrible homesickness as I am. 



" L'Ame franchise et 1'ame allemande." Introduction 
par M. Ernest Daudet. Paris: Attinger Freres. 



ARTHUR GEORGE HEATH 

Arthur George Heath was a fellow and tutor 
at New College, Oxford, when he joined the army 
in August, 19 1 4. He had a passion for music and 
a talent for it. He was not a " born soldier." He 
was one of the many young Oxford and Cambridge 
men of high promise, sacrificed to the war; whose 
ideals, as Professor Gilbert Murray says, were gen- 
tle, and who were apparently unfitted in mind or 
body for war, and yet, when the call came, went 
gayly forth, " as jostling for honor." 

When Arthur Heath was killed in France, in Oc- 
tober, 19 1 5, many testified to his bravery. It was 
said his men would have followed him anywhere; 
perhaps because, as he humorously quotes from a 
Tommy's letter, he himself was willing to " bear 
the blunt." His last words were, " Don't trouble 
about me." A letter written to his mother a few 
months before he died on his twenty-eighth birthday, 
is one of the most remarkable and beautiful letters 
of the war. 

{Letter of Arthur Heath) 

■** , •» *■ 1 July 11, 1915. 

My dear Mother: J 

It is Sunday, and though we shall be working all 

22 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 23 

the same in a few hours, I feel that I should like to 
take the opportunity of telling you some things 
I've wanted to say now for a long time. You re- 
member that I told you when I was going that noth- 
ing worried me so much as the thought of the 
trouble I was causing you by going away, or might 
cause you if I was killed. Now that death is near 
I feel the same. I don't think for myself that I've 
more than the natural instinct of self-preservation, 
and I certainly do not find the thought of death a 
great terror that weighs on me. I feel rather that, 
if I were killed, it would be you and those that love 
me, that would have the real burden to bear, and 
I am writing this letter to explain why, after all, 
I do not think it should be regarded as merely a 
burden. It would, at least, ease my feelings to try 
and make the explanation. We make the division 
between life and death as if it were one of dates — 
being born at one date and dying some years after. 
But just as we sleep half our lives, so when we're 
awake, too, we know that often we're only half 
alive. Life, in fact, is a quality rather than a 
quantity, and there are certain moments of real life 
whose value seems so great that to measure them by 
the clock, and find them to have lasted so many 
hours or minutes, must appear trivial and meaning- 
less. Their power, indeed, is such that we cannot 
properly tell how long they last, for they can color 
all the rest of our lives, and remain a source of 



24 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

strength and joy that you know not to be exhausted, 
even though you cannot trace exactly how it works. 
The first time I ever heard Brahms' Requiem re- 
mains with me as an instance of what I mean. Aft- 
erwards you do not look back on such events as 
mere past things whose position in time can be local- 
ized; you still feel as living the power that first 
awoke in them. Now if such moments could be 
preserved, and the rest strained off, none of us could 
wish for anything better. . . . And just as these 
moments of joy or elevation may fill our own lives, 
so, too, they may be prolonged in the experience of 
our friends, and, exercising their power in those 
lives, may know a continual resurrection. You 
won't mind a personal illustration. I know that 
one of the ways I live in the truest sense is in the 
enjoyment of music. Now just as the first hearing 
of the Requiem was for me more than an event 
which passed away, so I would like to hope that my 
love of music might be for those who love and sur- 
vive me more than a memory of something past, 
a power rather that can enhance for them the beauty 
of music itself. Or, again, we love the South Down 
country. Now I w T ould hate to think that, if I died, 
the " associations " would make these hills " too 
painful " for you, as people sometimes say. I would 
like to think the opposite, that the joy I had in the 
Downs might not merely be remembered by you 
as a fact in the past, but rather be, as it were, 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 25 

transfused into you and give a new quality of hap- 
piness to your holidays there. . . . Will you at 
least try, if I am killed, not to let the things I have 
loved, cause you pain, but rather to get increased 
enjoyment from the Sussex Downs or from Janie 
singing folk songs, because I have found such joy in 
them, and in that way the joy I have found can 
continue to live. 

And again, do not have all this solemn funeral 
music, Dead Marches, and so on, played over me as 
if to proclaim that all has now come to an end, and 
nothing better remains to those who loved one than 
a. dignified sorrow. I would rather have the Dutch 
Easter Carol, where the music gives you the idea of 
life, and joy springing up continually. 

And if what I have written seems unreal and fan- 
tastic to you, at least there's one thing with which 
you'll agree. The will to serve now is in both 
of us, and you approve of what I'm doing. Now 
that is just one of the true and vital things that 
must not be, and is not exhausted by the moment 
at which it is felt or expressed. My resolution can 
live on in yours, even if I am taken, and, in your 
refusal to regret what we know to have been a 
right decision, it can prove itself undefeated by 
death. 

Please forgive me if I have worried you by all 
this talk. If we loved one another less I could not 
have written this, and, just because we love one 



26 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

another, I cannot bear to think that, if I died, I 

should only give you trouble and sorrow 

All my love to you, 

Arthur. 



Taken by permission from " Letters of Arthur George 
Heath." With memoir by Gilbert Murray. Published by 
Longmans, Green & Company. 



OBSERVER B de P- 



M. Victor Giraud, who has collected a good many 
French war letters, says of a letter written by a 
young aviator that nothing " more young, more 
fresh, more noble, and more pure " has come to his 
notice; and he suggests that we do not often think 
enough of the parents and grandparents of these 
heroes ; of the long line of " traditions, obscure de- 
votions, secret virtues," of which they are the happy 
outcome and the witness. The boy's name is not 
given, although in his letter he says the great general 
who decorated him said the name was not unknown 
to him, and we learn that his father was a brave 
man before him. Such a letter, as M. Giraud says, 
does as much honor to the family that received it as 
to the son who wrote it: 

(Letter of Observer B de P ) 

All my happiness is increased by the honor I am 
going to do to my old warrior father by this cross 
that is going to shine on my breast. I have been 
officially cited for the legion of honor. I shall have 
it in a few days. I am very proud. I had the 
choice between promotion and the cross. So much 
the worse for the stripes! Papa often said to me: 
" It is a piece of foolishness; but, my faith, it is 
27 



28 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

chic, it tempts and delights me; the stripes are 
money, this cross is glory." 

I am still a little under the shock of the emotion, 
and I hardly know how to tell it all to you. I 
have not slept this night. I kept seeing the poor 
enemy awaited on the other side by their own, and 
I knew the anxiety that crushes you when one of 
our " birds " is across the enemy's lines and is a 
long time coming back. I thought of their moth- 
ers, of their sisters, of their wives perhaps. . . . 

There was a pilot, a lieutenant ; and the observer, 
a captain. We met about 2,700 meters up. I had 
thrown overboard glasses, gloves, and the whole 
business! I was able to fire four shots, and three 
hit. One killed dead the captain-observer, straight 
in the heart; another broke one of the pilot's arms, 
at the same time piercing his reservoir; the third 
passed through his neck. They went down like a 
water-spout ; but the pilot, very skillful, was able to 
make a landing with one arm, and the machine was 
uninjured. We swooped down after them like a 
vulture after its prey; it was magnificent. Never, 
never can you imagine what it was. 

On the ground, I leaped out of my machine. The 
observer, dead at his post, was lifeless. The pilot 
salutes and surrenders. My faith! You will 
laugh, but I fell upon that young fellow, and shook 
his hand with all my strength. He understood, 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 29 

and I saw in his eyes that he knew what was pass- 
ing in my heart. 

In the evening, the commanding general sum- 
moned to headquarters the pilot (Gilbert) and my- 
self, and congratulated us warmly; it was de Cas- 
telnau. Our name was not unknown to him, he 
told me. He was very nice, and I assure you it is 
an interview not soon to be forgotten. I would 
like it if the cross I am going to wear could be 
one of those that Papa wore for so long; can you 
not find me one of those croix de chevalier? 

I haven't the time to write more. I am a little 
unnerved, but very well, and contented, and happy 
in your happiness. May dear Papa also be happy! 
I thought of him also up there, at the great moment 
of the attack. I had good chances not to return. 
Sweet and fleeting images, your features, and your 
names, were in my heart during my last prayer up 
there, up there! It was solemn and sweet, and as 
always I have been protected, blessed. Thanks, 
dear God! Thanks for your tenderness, your 
prayers, .your love which make me so strong, so 
brave. 



"Lettre9 du Front," par Victor Giraud, Revue des Deux 
Mondes. 



"GOD PUNISH ENGLAND!" 

In a new volume of the Oxford Dictionary, Vol. 
IX., the word " Strafe " appears for the first time: 

"Strafe (straf), v. slang. [From the Ger. phrase Gott 
strafe England, ' God Punish England/ a common salu- 
tation in Germany in 1914 and the following years.] 
Used (originally by British soldiers in the war against 
Germany) in various senses suggested by its origin: To 
punish; to do damage to; to attack fiercely; to heap im- 
precations on. . . ." 

Among the citations given is one from the London 
Times Literary Supplement: "The Germans are 
called the Gott-strafers, and strafe is becoming a 
comic English word " ; and another from the London 
Daily Mail: " The word strafe is now almost uni- 
versally used. Not only is an effective bombardment 
of the enemy's lines or a successful trench raid de- 
scribed by Tommy as * strafing the Fritzes,' but there 
are occasions when certain ' brass hats ' are strafed 
by imprecation. And quite recently the present 
writer heard a working-class woman shout to one of 
her offspring, ' Wait till I git 'old of yer, I'll strarfe 
yer,Iwill!" 

London Punch printed a picture showing a Ger- 
man family going through its " morning hate " cere- 
monies. It all sounds like something out of a comic 
30 



44 THE GOOD SOLDIER" 31 

weekly, but in its issue of December 5, 19 14, the 
Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung printed the fol- 
lowing letter from the front written by a lieutenant 
of the landwehr to the Hanover Advertiser: 

(Letter of " God Punish England! ") 

As a good Hanoverian I send you from French 
soil the heartiest, true-German greeting, and beg 
you to grant a modest corner to the following lines : 

"GOD PUNISH ENGLAND!" "MAY 
HE PUNISH HER!" 

That is the new greeting of our troops. Sug- 
gested by some one or other, it is spreading. He 
who hears it for the first time is surprised, under- 
stands, and it goes further on its round. Every- 
where here, when an officer or private enters a room, 
he does not say " Good day," or even " Adieu " 
when he goes out, but " God punish England ! " and 
the answer, "May He punish her!" Oh, it is 
pleasant to German ears, and the customary greet- 
ing has seldom been so much reflected upon, as now. 
41 May He punish her! " Yes, indeed, that is what 
we want, and that is why we Germans have come 
away, and left our home and our families, to punish 
all who have robbed us of peace. 

And you dear ones at home, you men who remain 
behind, keep it before your eyes. Our motto is, like 
yours, " God punish England ! " And when you are 



32 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

sitting at your usual table in the restaurant, think 
of it. Don't say, " Prosit/' when you drink ; no, 
do like us, say, " God punish England!" and 
answer, " May He punish her! " 

It refreshes the heart, when the company-leader 
greets his company in the morning. Instead of 
wishing a good morning, for every morning close to 
the enemy is to us a good-morning; we do not 
need to wish one another that. But an iron voice 
rings across the market-place of V. : " Attention ! 
God punish England ! " and from three hundred 
throats there meets us the cry: " May He punish 
her!" 

Perhaps the greeting will also take up its abode in 
our dear Hanover for the period of the campaign, 
and perhaps other newspapers and other German 
districts will take up the suggestion. And with this 
good-by. " May He punish her! " 

— Printed in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zei- 
tung, Dec. 5, 1914. 

Taken by permission from " A Month's German News- 
papers," selected and translated by Adam L. Gowans. 
Published by Frederick A. Stokes Company. 



PIERRE-MAURICE MASSON 

The tragic sense of loss is in no case felt more than 
in the story of Pierre-Maurice Masson, professor of 
French literature at the University of Fribourg, and 
the author of many noteworthy biographical studies. 
In the summer of 1916, Lieutenant Masson was ex- 
pecting a permit to return to the " trenches of the 
Sorbonne," as he phrased it, to receive his doctor's 
degree. He had corrected and read the proof of his 
master work on Rousseau at the front, and now, as 
he wrote to his friends, " The monster is ready! " 

But he did not get his permit. The activity of 
the Crown Prince at Verdun caused all permits to be 
recalled. " Man proposes," he writes, " and the 
Boches dispose." Inclined to fret a little at first, he 
nevertheless says that his bad luck is a mere bagatelle 
compared with " the future of the world " ; and 
when he gets the command of his company, he is 
wholly content and writes that he has become re- 
signed, and no longer thinks of anything but the 
war. " I send to the devil the Sorbonne and like- 
wise the permits, and I only desire to attend strictly 
to my business. It is a hard and beautiful business, 
and I would not give my place commanding the com- 
pany for all the sinecures back there." 

Pierre-Maurice Masson was a son of Lorraine, 
having been born at Metz in 1879. He was one of 
33 



34 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

the Alsace-Lorraine " protesters." He was for " la 
revanche," but for the " revenge of justice," as he 
said. In 191 1, he wrote that the time for all silence 
and restraint was past, and that France should not 
be afraid to say, " We do not accept the brigandage 
and we demand the return of our stolen property." 
Justice is the word most frequently found in his let- 
ters. The war must not be terminated until justice 
is done. " We have suffered too much in the name 
of justice," he writes to his wife, " to accept a peace 
without it." Of one of his friends killed in the war 
he writes that he has " waked in that eternal serenity 
that awaits the defenders of justice." He tells his 
wife that whatever happens they must have courage 
and " hold to the end." 

It was his strong sense of justice, no doubt, that 
explains Lieutenant Masson's unusually (even for 
the French) sympathetic relations with the men he 
commanded. " This equality in the anonymous 
peril," he writes, " has something fraternal about it 
that is very salutary." Just because he will leave a 
few " old books " behind, he does not believe makes 
his life worth any more than that of the men whose 
uncomplaining heroism he is never tired of praising. 
Some of them know that their villages have been 
burned, their homes pillaged, that their wives and 
children have fled — they know not where — and 
yet they refuse to think of anything but of " la 
patrie," and its welfare. Every time he talks with 
the soldiers — and there is time, he says, to talk on 
the long night marches — he feels himself inferior. 
And this is the reason, as he writes to his wife, why 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 35 

he tries to do little things for them, show interest 
in their lives and families and worries, " and," he 
adds almost naively, " they feel, I think, that this 
interest is sincere." 

M. Victor Giraud, whom Professor Masson suc- 
ceeded at Fribourg, says that his letters are among 
the most beautiful of the war letters, and that one 
of them at least is destined to become classic: the 
description he wrote to his wife of the trenches at 
Fleury, where he later lost his life. 

(Letter of Pierre-Maurice 'Masson) 

Through shining acres of the musket spears — 
Where flame and wither with swift intercease 
Flowers of red sleep that not the cornfield bears — 
— Francis Thompson. 

June 19, 1915. 
I find your letter on returning from our visit to 
the Fleury trenches. We left in an automobile at 
two o'clock this morning, and were for three and a 
half hours in the trenches that face Fort-Marre. 
It is one of the most active sectors in all this part, 
one of those where the bombardment is continuous; 
it is precisely for that reason that we made our visit 
at dawn, because this is the time when both sides, 
by mutual agreement, each worn out by the hard 
night, drops guns, mortars and grenades, and goes 
to sleep. And, in fact, it was very quiet all the 
time we were there, but the stretcher-bearers who 
were coming down, just as we arrived, testified to 



36 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

the activity of the night. I see again, especially, in 
one of the narrow trenches, carried by two men in 
a sail cloth, like some poor dead game, a sort of 
human rag, that a shell has pulverized. But what is 
one dead in this vast cemetery ! The first line trench 
that has been captured from the Germans, and that 
has seen some furious, hand-to-hand fighting, several 
times changing hands, is only an ancient charnel 
house, where the walls, the parapets, the loop-holes 
are builded of human dough. One still sees, here 
and there, a foot sticking out, a back humped into a 
piece of buttress. Little by little, all the wretched- 
ness has been concealed by being clothed with sand 
bags, but it is only a poor screen. The frightful 
acrid odor that chokes you, the incessant buzzing of 
great green flies that swarm over the debris, are 
enough to remind you where you are. And to tell 
that men live here, in this cadaverous earth, in this 
tragic plague spot, which the sun fecundates and 
spreads! Along the narrow trench one sees men 
pass with the little copper sprayers that the vine 
dressers use when they go to spray the vines; they 
sprinkle with chloride of lime and disinfectants the 
vines of the dead. And, moreover, the genuine vine 
of Toul still grows here. In this earth enriched by 
blood and baked by the sun, everything has rank 
growth. Between the parapets, among the old bags, 
the abandoned equipment, in the rottenness and the 
rubbish, in the midst of the chaos dug by the shells, 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 3 7 

one sees the roots of vines, or rather new shoots of a 
veritable green growth. Further there are a lot of 
potato sprouts, and above all fields of wild poppies, 
of a glorious red, blazing, that seem the blooming 
of all the blood that has watered this ground. How 
a human life seems a small thing, an insignificant 
thing, in this jumble of corpses, of spring-time re- 
newal, and careless happy existence ! For all along 
this bloody labyrinth, young poilus, who do not say 
all that they feel, and who perhaps no longer feel, 
sleep peacefully, laugh, or play " manille," while 
waiting for the shell that is going to kill them. 

"Lettres de Guerre." Pierre-Maurice Masson. Pref- 
ace de Victor Giraud. Notice biographique par Jacques 
Zeiller. Paris: Librairie Hachette. 



CONINGSBY DAWSON 

" And was I really the budding novelist in New 
York?" Coningsby Dawson writes in one of his 
letters. But he was more than the " budding 
novelist." The first novel he wrote, " The Garden 
Without Walls," had an immediate and enviable suc- 
cess. In interrupting his career to enter the war, 
he probably gave up more than most. Yet, from the 
mud banks of the Somme, he exclaims, apparently 
with innermost conviction : " The insufficiency of 
merely setting nobilities down on paper ! " and in 
another letter, with equal conviction: " O, if I get 
back, how differently I shall write! " 

Coningsby Dawson was graduated from Oxford 
with honors in 1 905, and in the same year came to 
the United States with the intention of studying for 
the ministry. But after a year at a Theological 
Seminary, he decided upon a literary career, which 
he was pursuing with great earnestness and good 
promise, when the war came. In the introduction 
to his book " Carry On," his father writes : " From 
the very first he saw clearly where his duty lay." 
He enlisted with the Canadian Field Artillery. 

{Letter of Coningsby Dawson) 

-. ^ . September 15th, 1916. 

Dear Father: 

It's a fortnight to-day since I left England, and 
38 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 39 

already I've seen action. Things move more quickly 
in this game — one which brings out both the best 
and the worst qualities in a man. If unconscious 
heroism is the virtue most to be desired, and heroism 
spiced with a strong sense of humor at that, then 
pretty well every man I have met out here has the 
amazing guts to wear his crown of thorns as though 
it were a cap-and-bells. To do that for the sake 
of corporate stout-heartedness is, I think, the acme of 
what Aristotle meant by virtue. A strong man, or 
a good man or a brainless man, can walk to meet 
pain with a smile on his mouth because he knows 
that he is strong enough to bear it, or worthy enough 
to defy it, or because he is such a fool that he has 
no imagination. But these chaps are neither par- 
ticularly strong, good, or brainless ; they're more like 
children, utterly casual with regard to trouble, and 
quite aware that it is useless to struggle against their 
elders. So they have the merriest of times while 
they can, and when the governess, Death, summons 
them to bed, they obey her with unsurprised quiet- 
ness. It sends the mercury of one's optimism rising 
to see the way they do it. I search my mind to find 
the bigness of motive which supports them, but it 
forever evades me. These lads are not the kind 
who philosophize about life; they're the sort, many 
of them, who would ordinarily wear corduroys and 
smoke a cutty pipe. I suppose the Christian martyrs 
would have done the same had corduroys been the 



4 o " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

fashion in that day, and if a Roman Raleigh had 
discovered tobacco. . . . 

Ever yours, with love, 

Con. 



Taken by permission from " Carry On," by Coningsby 
Dawson. Published by John Lane Company. 



A SAINT-CYRIEN 

The famous vow of the Saint-Cyriens — the young 
French officers corresponding to American West- 
Pointers — is that they will go into battle wearing 
their white gloves and their red and white plumes 
in their caps. And as they go gallantly forth to 
battle, in all their bravery, so they ask the people 
at home to put on their gala attire to meet them on 
their return. 

It was a Saint-Cyrien who wrote: "When the 
troops come home victorious through the Arc de 
Triomphe, put on your finest apparel and be there." 
And another wrote : " We shall perhaps not be 
there, but others will be there for us. Do not weep, 
do not wear mourning, for we shall have died with 
a smile on our lips and a superhuman joy in our 
heart. Vive la France ! Vive la France ! " 

How well the injunction has been obeyed is illus- 
trated in the story that has been told many times of 
the young French wife, searching the faces of the 
marching soldiers for her husband; and who, when 
one stepped out of the ranks to tell her that her hus- 
band had been killed the day before, raised her child 
high in her arms and cried : " Vive la France! " 

In the following letter written by a Saint-Cyrien, 
by name Gaston Voizard, M. Barres, who quotes 
it, says he seems almost to apologize for outliving 
4i 



42 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

some of his brother officers by a few months. The 
letter is written on Christmas night, 1914. His 
turn did not come until the following April. The 
letter is one of the few addressed to a " demoiselle " ; 
most of the letters, of the Frenchmen especially, are 
written to mothers: 

{Letter of a Saint-Cyrien) 

December 25, 1918. 

It is midnight, Mademoiselle and good friend, and 
in order to write to you I have just removed my 
white gloves. (This is not a bid for admiration. 
The act has nothing of the heroic about it; my last 
colored pair adorn the hands of a poor foot-soldier 
[piou-piou] who was cold.) 

I am unable to find words to express the pleasure 
and emotion caused me by your letter which arrived 
in the evening following a terrific bombardment of 
the poor little village we are holding. The letter 
was accepted among us as a balm for all possible 
racking of nerves and other curses. That letter, 
which was read in the evening to the officers of my 
battalion, — I ask pardon for any offense to your 
modesty, — comforted the most cast-down after the 
hard day and gave proof to all that the heart of the 
young girls of France is nothing short of magnificent 
in its beneficence. 

It is, as I have said, midnight. To the honor and 
good fortunes which have come to me of command- 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 43 

ing my company during the last week (our captain 
having been wounded) I owe the pleasure of writing 
you at this hour from the trenches, where by prodi- 
gies of cunning, I have succeeded in lighting a candle 
without attracting the attention of the gentlemen 
facing us, who are, by the way, not more than a hun- 
dred meters distant. 

My men, under their breath, have struck up the 
traditional Christmas hymn, " He is born, the Child 
Divine." The sky glitters with stars. One feels 
like making merry over all this, and, behold, one is 
on the brink of tears. I think of Christmases of 
other years spent with my family ; I think of the tre- 
mendous effort still to be made, of the small chance 
I have for coming out of this alive ; I think, in short, 
that perhaps this minute I am living my last Christ- 
mas. 

" Regret," do you say? . . . No, not even sad- 
ness. Only a tinge of gloom at not being among 
those I love. 

All the sorrow of my thoughts is given to those 
best of friends fallen on the field of honor, whose 
loyal affection has made them almost my brothers; 
— Allard, Fayolle, so many dear friends whom II 
shall never see again! When on the evening of 
July 31, in my capacity of " Pere Systeme" of the 
promotion, I had pronounced amid a holy hush the 
famous vow to make ourselves conspicuous by facing 
death wearing white gloves, our good-hearted 



44 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

Fayolle, who was, I may say, the most of an enthu- 
siast of all the friends I have ever known, said to 
me with a grin: " What a stunning impression we 
shall make upon the Boches! They will be so as- 
tounded that they will forget to fire." But, alas, 
poor Fayolle has paid dearly his debt to his country, 
for the title of Saint-Cyrien ! And they are all fall- 
ing around me, seeming to ask when the time of their 
" Pere Systeme " is to come, so that " Montmirail " x 
on entering Heaven may receive God's blessing with 
full ranks. 

But a truce to useless repinings! Let us give 
thought only to our dear France, our indispensable, 
imperishable, ever-living country! And, b)' this 
beauteous Christmas night, let us put our faith more 
firmly than ever in victory. 

I must ask you, Mademoiselle and good friend, 
to excuse this awful scrawl. Will you allow me to 
hope for a reply in the near future, and will you 
permit this young French officer very respectfully to 
kiss the hand of a great-souled and generous-hearted 
maiden of France? 



Taken by permission from "The Undying Spirit of 
France," by Maurice Barres. Translated by Margaret W. 
B. Corwin. With a Foreword by Theodore Stanton. 
Published by the Yale University Press. 

1 Name of the class at Saint Cyr. 



ROBERT ERNEST VERNEDE 

Little you'd care what I laid at your feet, 

Ribbon or crest or shawl — 
What if I bring you nothing, sweet, 

Nor maybe come home at all? 
Ah, but you'll know, Brave Heart, you'll know 

Two things I'll have kept to send: 
My honor, for which you bade me go, 

And my love — my love to the end. 

R. E. Vernede. 

Some one has said that middle age, always a blunder, 
has become since the war a sort of crime. But for 
Robert Ernest Vernede, his nearly forty years were 
neither. Although four years over age, he enlisted 
early in the war as a private. Edmund Gosse, who 
has written in praise of " the generous gesture," with 
which the youth of the world " greeted the sacrifice 
of their hopes and ours," says some praise should be 
reserved for those who having been brought face to 
face with the illusions of youth, had " got into the 
habit of not being soldiers." 

Robert Ernest Vernede's habits were the furthest 
from a soldier's. When the war came, he was mar- 
ried and deep in a Hertfortshire garden. He was 
an Oxford man, a novelist and a poet. He was born 
in London in 1875, but was of French extraction. 
Robert Louis Stevenson, in his " Travels With a 
Donkey," mentions the ancestral castle of the 
45 



46 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

Vernedes. He not only went to the war voluntarily, 
but having returned home wounded once, he went 
again, and this time he did not return. He was 
killed leading an attack on Havrincourt Wood, 
April 9, 1916. " It was thus," his friend Chester- 
ton writes, " that he passed from the English coun- 
try life he loved so much, with its gardening and 
dreaming, to an ambush and a German gun." 

His letters were written to his wife. They are 
filled with his contentment with what he is doing, 
and with his admiration for the fighting men. He 
thinks the men are " wonderful and awfully good to 
one another." Even the cook exposes himself to 
danger to assist the stretcher-bearers — " which I'm 
afraid will render me weak-minded towards his cook- 
ery in the future." He writes: " The only cheer- 
ful thing is the sun, when it appears, and the men 
whose cheeriness is unending." Nor is it " the sort 
of heedless gayety I used to suspect them of, but a 
gallant effort to make the best of things, and not let 
their morale fall below an ideal." He himself is 
always " in the pink," as he is fond of saying, and he 
quotes from a Tommy's letter: " Dear Mum and 
Dad, and dear loving sisters Rosie, Letty, and our 
Gladys. I hope you keeps the home fires burning. 
Not arf. The boys are in the pink. Not arf." 

More than to most, the issues of the war were 
simple, direct and clear to this Englishman: a case of 
right and wrong, darkness and light, democratic 
civilization and dynastic and military rule. Of one 
of his poems, " Before the Assault," written at the 
front, and acknowledged to be one of the finest of 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 47 

the war poems, Chesterton says : " No printed con- 
troversy or political eloquence could put more logi- 
cally, let alone more poetically, the higher pacifism 
which is resolute to dry up at the fountain head the 
bitter waters of the dynastic wars than these four 
lines : 

Then to our children there shall be no handing 
Of fates so vain — of passions so abhorr'd — 

But Peace — the Peace which passeth understanding — 
Not in our time — but in their time, O Lord. 

In one of the letters, he refers to this poem: 

{Letter of Robert Ernest Vernede) 

I rather foresee a time (after Peace) when people 
will be sick of the name of War — won't hear a 
word of it or anything connected with it. There 
seem to be such people now, and I see numbers of 
silly books and papers advertised as having nothing 
to do with the war. It's natural, perhaps, that sol- 
diers should want a diversion and even civilians; 
but I rather hope that people won't altogether forget 
it in our generation. That's what I wanted to say 
in the verses I began about — 

Not in our time, O Lord, we now beseech Thee 
To grant us peace — the sword has bit too deep — 

but never got on with. What I mean is that for 
us there can be no real forgetting. We have seen 
too much of it, known too many people's sorrow, felt 



48 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

it too much to return to an existence in which it has 
no part. Not that one wants to be morbid about it 
later ; but still less does one want to be as superficial 
as before. The sword has bit too deep. 

"Letters to His Wife," by R. E. Vernede. London: 
W. Collins & Co. 



ANDRE CORNET-AUQUIER 

Andre Cornet-Auquier was a professor before the 
war, although before he died he had determined to 
remain in the army where he thought his country's 
need was greater. His letters were written from 
the Alsatian front to his parents. Like so many of 
these soldiers' letters, especially the French, they are 
remarkable not only for their spirit but their literary 
excellence. 

Also like so many of the French soldiers, and 
contrary to popular belief, this young French cap- 
tain is deeply religious. His faith is unwavering, 
and he says with him prayer is a " constant state." 
But if any one thinks his piety interferes with his 
gayety, he is mistaken. " How I make them laugh," 
he writes in one letter. He quotes the rules and 
regulations for the Grand Hotel of the Trenches, 
how they must not leave the gas burning, nor carry 
off the sandbags, nor lean out of the windows, nor, 
especially, have anything to do with the rival con- 
cern over the way. He is very sure that the neigh- 
bors over the way " are not as gay as we." 

The French captain is constantly imploring his 
parents to be brave, and not let their affection for 
him be a source of weakness to him, but, on the con- 
trary, an armor. He asks his mother particularly 
to be " the most French " of all admirable French 
49 



50 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

mothers, and say to herself that " no life whatso- 
ever, not even that of thine own son, is anything in 
comparison with the salvation of the country." 

Captain Cornet-Auquier's last letter, dated Febru- 
ary 29, 191 6, closes with the words, " I am going to 
bed without even eating, so weary am I." He was 
mortally wounded on March 1, and died the next 
day. He received the war cross and the cross of the 
Legion of Honor, although he says with all the busi- 
ness in hand, there is not much time to think of 
honors and advancements. He was twenty-eight. 

Perhaps because of the numerous " English 
uncles," whom he mentions, his idea of what the 
Allies are fighting for most nearly coincides with that 
most often expressed by an Englishman or an Ameri- 
can — that the war is against war. 

{Letter of Andre Cornet- A uquier) 

How I would like to feel that you are ready, even 
before it comes, to make if necessary the sacrifice 
of my life. How I would like to be able to say to 
myself: " At least they are ready, and if my death 
would be painful to them, they are resigned to it, 
resigned in advance." I also have moments of im- 
patience, especially when I feel myself so full of 
youth and strength, when I reflect on all that I have 
abandoned, of work, hopes, all that future which was 
smiling on me, — at such moments I wish it were all 
ended. But this morning I began reflecting on what 
is the life of an individual in comparison with the 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 51 

general peace of all the nations of Europe,— 
nothing. . . . 

. . . My hour has perhaps not yet sounded. It 
will probably come. I no longer pray for myself, 
but for the others, for you all, and for thee, mother, 
especially; and how ardent, fervent, passionate is 
that prayer. I ask God to make you all calm and 
brave whatever happens. I would be a hundredfold 
stronger if I knew that you were joyously ready. 
And especially do not look upon me as a hero or a 
wonder. No. What have I done that is extraor- 
dinary ? Nothing. I have tried to do my duty like 
everybody else. That's all. . . . What are our 
lives worth when we think of the years of happiness 
and peace of those who will follow us and those 
who may survive us. We labor for to-morrow, in 
order that there may be no more wars, no more 
spilling of blood, no more killing, no more wounded, 
no more mutilated victims; we labor, we whom our 
mothers will so weep for, in order that other mamas 
may never know these bitter tears. In truth, when 
one thinks of the centuries that this peace will last, 
one is ashamed of the rebellious movements which 
the flesh is guilty of at certain moments at the 
thought of death. . . . 

Taken by permission from " A Soldier Unafraid," by 
Captain Andre Cornet-Auquier. Translated with an in- 
troduction by Theodore Stanton. Published by Little, 
Brown and Company. 



MARCEL ETEVE 

Marcel Eteve was a student at the Ecole Normale 
in Paris. He was an accomplished musician, and 
had already had some success as a composer. He 
was twenty-four years old. He was put at the head 
of his column because of his great height. The part 
of the trench he occupied, he writes jestingly to a 
friend, he has had dug deeper, because his head stuck 
out, and he is too lazy to stoop, and, moreover, he 
has a right to be comfortable ! 

" What a bizarre and joyous war, when you think 
of it from one point of view, and not from another ! " 
We amuse ourselves like " little fools," he says, and 
" the joys of trench life have hardly been exag- 
gerated." To be sure, he regrets his music, in the 
midst of the caroming of the cannon and the snoring 
of the men. But he hopes that what he loses in study 
he may gain in spontaneity of impressions, if he is 
ever permitted to " replunge into civilized har- 
monies " — which is his heart's desire. In the mean- 
time, he reads, everything apparently, including " my 
dear Kipling.", 

Lieutenant Eteve was very popular with his men. 
It is said he never asked them to do anything he did 
not do himself " at least once." He writes to his 
mother that the main thing is that they be willing, 
not afraid, and " love me a little." 
52 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 53 

Eteve was killed in the Picardy attack in July, 
19 1 6. His company had taken almost immediately 
the enemy's trench, but soon after was cut off from 
all communication with the rear. For an hour it 
defended itself with grenades. Already wounded in 
the shoulder, Lieutenant Eteve was in a good deal 
of pain, but he kept his command. Second-lieu- 
tenant M came up to him and said : " My old 

fellow, if in five minutes we don't get reinforce- 
ments, we are dead. We are not going to get them. 
Adieu." Eteve replied : " I know it, but let us not 
say anything about it, in order not to discourage the 
men. Adieu." A few minutes later he received a 
bullet in the head. His name was given to the 
trench when it was finally definitely held, and the 
standard of the company — when it also " died " 
and was disbanded — to which her son gave its first 
" ray of glory " was sent to the mother for the school 
which she directs. 

Most of Lieutenant Eteve's letters are written to 
his mother. They are love letters, like so many of 
the letters to mothers. " I am decorated," he writes 
to her; " on my heart are the golden fringes of the 
flag; in my cartridge box are three little violets 
filched from your bouquet." He says he can die 
because " thanks to you, I have already had a life 
longer and fuller than the majority of men." He 
says he loves her with all his soul, " which you have 
fashioned." His last words to her are, " Let us 
hope, and love each other, hard, hard. . . ." 

He had been fortunate in falling in with a group 
of officers who are so kind, as he tells his mother, 



54 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

and agreeable, and also intellectual. " Not one of 
them," he says, " is ' militaire ' to excess, and in the 
worst sense of the word." It was about militarism 
and frightfulness and " war on war " that he wrote 
to his friend : 

{Letter of Marcel Eteve) 

You speak of the " war on war," and you seem 
to think I do not agree with you. What kind of a 
brute do you think I am ? Is it my little speeches in 
favor of the poor " meletaires " that warrant you in 
doing me such an injustice? Could you think that 
the soldiers I was defending were different from 
you and me, submitting to the war as the worst of 
catastrophes; and that I was one of those who see 
in it the normal employment of their faculties? 

However, if it is necessary to make a full con- 
fession, perhaps I have something to do with your 
misunderstanding. For some time, in fact, I tried, 
half seriously, to acquire, to a certain degree, a mind 
" for military purposes." But it was not serious, 
and I never had great confidence in the business. I 
have, emphatically, not the required " hate." 

And I have resolved not to bother any more about 
it, knowing that I do not need the stimulus. To 
begin at the bottom, I shall have, in fact, every time 
that it shall be necessary to strike hard and cruelly, 
the blind rage of combat, and it is much. In climb- 
ing a little higher up the ladder of motives, I shall 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 55 

have also the necessary self-esteem and proper bear- 
ing; and that is something to go on. Finally, even 
from a still more intellectual point of view, I shall 
have the conscience to perform a necessary duty, and 
to take part, from this moment, in the " war on 
war." And let it go at that. . . . 

" Lieutenant Marcel Eteve : Lettres d'un Combattant." 
Preface de M. Paul Dupuy. Paris: Librairie Hachette. 



THE SOLDIER PRIEST 

A WORLD war, more than American politics, makes 
strange bedfellows. A French soldier priest de- 
scribes the following incident of the retreat from 
Charleroi : " One evening four of us, a protestant 
preacher, a rabbi, an officer who called himself a 
free thinker, and I, had the good luck to find a bed, 
without any bedding, of course, and a mattress. 
Quick, quick, let us draw lots: the preacher sleeps 
with the rabbi (the Old with the New Testament), 
and Dogma, which I represent, lies down by the 
side of free thinking. In less than two minutes, 
there is a wonderful concert, the like of which no 
great religious congress could produce." 

Another story is also told of the dying Catholic 
soldier who asked the Jewish stretcher-bearer for a 
crucifix; and the Jew brought a crucifix, and a few 
moments afterwards was himself hit by a shell, and 
died in the arms of a Catholic priest. The democ- 
ratization and fraternization going on in the armies, 
is thus likewise producing a greater tolerance and 
sympathy in those of opposing religious beliefs. 

In fact, what with the fighting priest, and the 
chaplain (" Not 'arf," as the British Tommy says, 
meaning the highest praise), and the Y. M. C. A. 
young man, and a Cardinal Mercier — one of the 
great heroes of the great war — all religion is giving 
56 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 57 

a pretty good account of itself in the war, and de- 
serves to be decorated with a special cross — which 
the Allied armies would hardly use as a movable 
target to direct their firing, as the Germans used a 
cross in Flanders. 

There are those who believe that anti-clericalism 
in France especially will be less popular after the 
war, owing to the heroism and self-sacrificing spirit 
shown by the fighting priests, who cheerfully acqui- 
esced in the law that made them soldiers, and whose 
rallying cry as they march to battle is: " Vivent les 
cures sac au dos! " 

Everybody mourns according to his own needs and 
desires. Brand Whitlock, American minister to 
former Belgium, tells that the scholarly old priest 
who described to him the destruction of Ypres, never 
wavered while he told of his brothers and friends 
shot down before his eyes; but when he reached the 
fate of the library, that priceless collection of books, 
he could not even say the word, but stammered 
" biblio . . . bib . . ." and bowed his head upon his 
arms and wept. 

A young French priest, Abbe Philippe P , in 

writing about Ypres, indulges in a little irony at the 
expense of " kultur," so long as he is telling about 
the destruction of the Halles and other buildings. 
But when he comes to the church — " la maison de 
Dieu " — this is what touches him most nearly, and 
it is here that the young priest weeps, and he writes 
that there must be no weakening until the hour for 
justice comes, and there is a " healing victory." 



58 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

(Letter of a Soldier Priest) 

Ypres! One should pray in this town, as in a 
temple; it is a shrine, a relic. . . . All is sacred. 

Literally, there is not a building that has not been 
shelled, pierced with bullets, riddled, disemboweled: 
doorless, windowless, roofless. Ruins of walls; 
piles of stones; here a broken column lying on the 
ground, there a portico; everywhere the stigmata of 
the shells. 

They have destroyed for the sake of destroying. 
There is no excuse for such devastation. Churches, 
halls, stalls, little homes of small merchants, work- 
shops — why this f rightfulness against all these? 
There is no strategic reason that will hold. Why 
this rage against a Belgian town, the city of a people 
drawn into the war in spite of themselves, from 
whom one only pretended to ask a passage through, 
and whom one is able to reproach only for being 
loyal even to sacrifice? It is rage, it is hate, it is 
madness. It is satanic. 

One repeats a thousand times the name of Pompeii 
in connection with Ypres. It comes spontaneously 
to the lips. But at Pompeii more things must have 
been respected. At Pompeii pretty statuettes were 
found uninjured ; you will find none at Ypres. And 
also, in the case of Pompeii, it was a natural force; 
it was the volcano; it was the earth giving birth to 
something; there was still on the horizon a beauty 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 59 

which Pliny could contemplate; it was hot ashes, 
spouting from the entrails of the earth, and falling 
like a veil on the city. 

At Ypres, it is the work of man against man, 
human brutality against justice and against beauty; 
heavy shells of Teuton metal, each seeking out its 
building, guided by a human will, the work of sci- 
ence in revolt against humanity and against art. No 
excuse. Nothing but horror. There is only one 
word that explains it all: sin. The word haunts 
me like an obsession. . . . 

There are great holes everywhere, down low, up 
high ; low in the streets, high in the walls. In what 
once were houses, are the remains of what once was 
life: a table, a counter with bottles, shelves of a 
grocery store, workshops, the thousand little every- 
day things, curtains, debris of bedding, lace, a piano. 

And I reflect : Here was a home, a shelter of love 
and of hope ; there were old people who watched the 
young growing up while saying: " They will take 
our place, they will have more comfort, more happi- 
ness than we have had." Where are they all now, 
the big and the little ? Just now a man said to me : 
" I have obtained permission to reenter this house 
which is mine; my son has been killed, and is lying 
out there." And his young daughter added, while 
picking a rose for us: "You see, one cannot be 
separated from what one has planted." From what 
one has planted ! All the hopes, affections, centered 



60 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

in these homes, now uprooted! All is a desert, 
all. . . . 

Some one near to me asks : " What will one do 
with these ruins after the war? " And I answered, 
as if mechanically: "A museum. And one will 
put over the entrance: Kultur! " It is the inevit- 
able thought of every one in the presence of this 
devastation. . . . 

If there is any irony in me, it lasts only a mo- 
ment. It is frozen upon my visit to the churches. 
I have tears in my eyes. It is as if a mailed fist 
clutched my heart; I can hardly breathe; I grow 
pale ; I am sick physically ; I am sick to my soul. I 
wish I had not entered. I wish I had not seen. . . . 

It is necessary to push open what is left of the 
tottering doors, or mount the piles of stone and go 
through the breaches in the walls. No longer any 
altar, a little heap of stones or marble; broken 
columns lying on the ground; all the stones of a 
pillar disjointed and thrown down one on top of the 
other, like a heap of great copper sous spilled out ; the 
stained glass, powder; the lead melted; the railings 
of the pulpit edentate ; the pipes of the organ twisted, 
and its case suspended in the air; almost all the 
statues thrown down as if in profanation; here an 
arm, there a leg, here a torso, there a head. 

And such queer freaks of the wreckage ; this saint 
with a crutch, thrown down, as an infirm old man 
whom the mischievous hand of a child had pushed 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 61 

over ; in the arms of the Virgin, an Infant Jesus with 
the head broken in two, and the fingers of one of 
the hands broken off while the other still holds the 
world; it smiles, such a sad little smile! A Virgin 
has a bullet in her temple; a Saint Roque has an 
authentic wound, while his dog has a broken foot. 
There is a new and surprising detail in every statue. 
. . . The pictures are full of holes; and here is a 
beautiful tryptych, painted on wood, that holds out 
its sagging doors like broken wings. . . . 

God is then the first victim . . . and it is neces- 
sary to live until the hour comes for justice, for a 
healing victory. 

"Lettres de Pretres aux Armees. Recuillees par Victor 
Bucaille. Paris: Librairie Payot et Cie. 



ROBERT HERTZ 

Those could hardly have remembered Masada, who 
thought that the Jews of the Allied nations would 
not rally with enthusiasm to fight against an enemy 
threatening to introduce once more race rule in the 
world. It was after Jerusalem had fallen, nearly 
two thousand years ago, and Masada was still resist- 
ing, that the brave Eleazar summoned the people to 
the public square and said : " Let us die unen- 
slaved." It was voted that every man should be the 
executioner of his own family, and every man was ; 
and in turn they killed one another, drawing lots, 
until at last only one man was left to fall upon his 
own sword. When the Romans advanced into the 
city, they found two women and five children, who 
had concealed themselves in a cave. 

One of the most moving letters of the war is writ- 
ten by Robert Hertz, socialist and son of a German 
Jew, living in and passionately loving France and 
her free institutions. He fights, as he writes to his 
wife, that their son may hold his head high, and 
walk erect, with a firm tread, an equal among free 
men, because he will be able to tell that his father 
fought (and died) in the great war for freedom. 

{Letter of Robert Hertz) 

Dear, I recall my dreams when I was quite small, 
and later when a student, in the little room close to 
62 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 63 

the kitchen, in the Avenue de l'Alma. With all my 
being I wanted to be a Frenchman, and to be re- 
garded worthy of being a Frenchman, and to prove 
that I was; and I dreamed of shining deeds of war 
against Wilhelm. Then this desire for " integra- 
tion " took another form, for my socialism was be- 
ginning to play a large part. . . . 

Now the old boyish dream is born again in me 
stronger than ever. I am grateful to my superiors 
who accept me as a subordinate, to the men whom I 
am proud to command, these, the children of a 
people truly elect. Yes, I am filled with gratitude 
towards the country that accepts me and makes my 
life complete. Nothing will be too much to pay for 
that, and that my little son may always walk with 
his head high, and in the restored France not know 
the torment that poisoned many hours of our child- 
hood and youth. " Am I a Frenchman? Do I de- 
serve to be one? " No, little chap, you will have a 
country, and you will be able to walk the earth with 
a firm tread, strong in the assurance: " My papa 
was there, and he has given all to France." For my 
part, if I have need of any, it is this thought that is 
the sweetest recompense. 

There was in the situation of the Jews, especially 
the German Jews newly immigrated, something dark 
and irregular, clandestine and bastard. I regard 
this war as an occasion happily come to " regularize 
the situation," for us and for our children. After- 



64 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

wards, they can labor, if they like, in work " above " 
and " inter " national, but first it is necessary to show 
by acts that one is not " below " a national ideal. . . . 

" Lettres de Pretres aux armees." Recuillees par Victor 
Bucaille. Paris: Librairie Payot et Cie. 



DECORATED 

When one of America's most illustrious citizens, an 
ex-president no less, received word that his son fight- 
ing with the Allied armies, had received the war 
Cross, it is told that he laughed aloud, not alto- 
gether for joy and pride, as we must believe, but at 
the thought of his tall son being kissed on both 
cheeks by a French general. 

The Anglo-Saxon, in the matter of embraces, is a 
good deal like the small boy in the Barrie play who 
wondered how in the deuce he was going to prevent 
his father from kissing him upon his return from 
a long absence in India, and finally hit upon the in- 
genious device of asking his father if he did not want 
to see the morning paper, and thrusting it out in 
front of him — as a sort of bulwark. The follow- 
ing letter is written by a young French seminarist 
who was decorated (and kissed) by General Joffre: 

{Letter of Abbe G , Decorated) 

In spite of the bad weather, Thursday was a beau- 
tiful day for me. I was at Chalons to receive the 
medaille militaire from the hands of General Joffre. 
. . . There were about fifty of us to be decorated. 
The generalissimo had a kind word for each one 
before decorating him : 

65 



66 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

" You are young to have the medaille militaire, 
sergeant!" he said to me. — "Twenty-three years 
old, my general." — " Twenty-three? Do you know 
I had to wait until I was sixty-three to get it? Are 
you pleased with it?" — "I am very proud of it, 
my general." — " I also." And after this brief dia- 
logue, a big hug with two great smacking kisses. 

How to tell you how I felt when the big mus- 
taches of the general rubbed my cheeks, I do not 
know ; at such a moment, you no longer live. Agree, 
that there is something very affecting for a young 
man of twenty-three to be embraced by this grand 
old man, for a sergeant to be decorated by a gen- 
eralissimo. I thought for a minute that the joy and 
pride would turn my head. It is true that I needed 
only to look around me to be convinced that I am 
no great thing more than the others who should have 
received it and deserved to receive it. . . . 



" Lettres du Front," par Victor Giraud. Revue des Deux 
Mondes. 



ALAN SEEGER 

Alan Seeger is the young American whose poems, 
with Rupert Brooke's, are among the precious things 
coming out of the war. The first entry in his diary, 
which his father found after his death in France, is 
dated September 27, 1914, and reads: " Fifth Sun- 
day since enlistment." This shows that Alan Seeger 
wasted no time. He wrote to his mother : " I hope 
you see the thing as I do and think that I have done 
well in doing my share for the side that I think 
right." He entered the war with " the lightest of 
light hearts," and expected to return. 

Alan Seeger was killed in the attack on Belloy-en- 
Santerre, on July 4, 191 6. The last sight of him is 
described by a friend: " I caught sight of Seeger 
and called to him, making a sign with my hand. He 
answered with a smile. How pale he was! His 
tall silhouette stood out on the green of the corn- 
field. He was the tallest man in his section. His 
head erect and pride in his eye, I saw him running 
forward, with bayonet fixed. Soon he disappeared, 
and that was the last time I saw my friend. . . ." 

There are bright and vivid descriptions of scene 
and mood in Alan Seeger's letters, since he was a 
poet, but it is the spirit of " the good soldier," will- 
ing to fight for what he thinks is right that gives to 
them their fine value. One of the letters is already 
67 



68 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

famous. It belongs with the great letters of the 
world; with Lincoln's to the mother who lost her 
sons in the Civil War. It belongs in the archives 
not of a family alone, but of a whole proud people. 
Many boys after reading it must have been moved 
to join young Seeger's company with, as he expressed 
it, " the elite of the world." 

(Alan Seeger's Letter) 
To His Mother 

Magneux, June 18, 1915. 
Received your letters and clippings yesterday on 
the march. I am not thinking of anything else but 
the business in hand, and if I write, it is only to 
divert the tedium of the trenches and to get a little 
intellectual exercise of which one stands so much in 
need now. You must not be anxious about my not 
coming back. The chances are about ten to one that 
I will. But if I should not, you must be proud, like 
a Spartan mother, and feel that it is j^our contribu- 
tion to the triumph of the cause whose righteousness 
you feel so keenly. Everybody should take part in 
this struggle which is to have so decisive an effect, 
not only on the nations engaged, but on all human- 
ity. There should be no neutrals but every one 
should bear some part of the burden. If so large a 
part should fall to your share, you would be in so 
far superior to other women and should be corre- 
spondingly proud. There would be nothing to re- 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 69 

gret, for I could not have done otherwise than what 
I did and I think I could not have done better. 
Death is nothing terrible after all. It may mean 
something more wonderful than life. It cannot pos- 
sibly mean anything worse to the good soldier. So 
do not be unhappy but no matter what happens walk 
with your head high and glory in your large share of 
whatever credit the world may give me. . . . 

Taken by permission from " Letters and Diary of Alan 
Seeger." Published by Charles Scribner's Sons. 



DIXON SCOTT 

Lieutenant Dixon Scott, like Rupert Brooke, 
died on the Gallipoli expedition. He was thirty- 
three years old, and had already been recognized as 
a sound critic and an excellent writer. Since his 
death, some of his articles contributed to various pub- 
lications have been collected, and are an eloquent 
confession of loss. The list of gifted young Eng- 
lish writers — poets, novelists and others — sacri- 
ficed to the war, is painfully long. It is not pleas- 
ant to think of brilliant young minds blotted out 
before they had hardly begun to throw their light. 
But Dixon Scott has left testimony that he made the 
sacrifice gladly, for posterity's sake. A paper he 
wrote on Rupert Brooke has become one of the 
memorable things that have been written about the 
war. The poem is prefaced by Brooke's sonnet, 
" The Soldier." 

(Letter of Dixon Scott) 

If I should die, think only this of me: 

That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is forever England. There shall be 

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, 
A body of England's, breathing English air, 

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. 
70 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 71 

And think, this heart, all evil shed away, 
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less 

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given ; 
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; 
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, 
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 

—"The Soldier," by Rupert Brooke. 

And these fourteen bars of beautiful melody some- 
how manage to cage, more completely than ever 
before, one of the dimmest and deepest, one of the 
most active and most illusive, of all the many mixed 
motives, beliefs, longings, ideals, which make those 
of us who have flung aside everything in order to 
fight still glad and gratified that we took the course 
we did. There do come moments, I must admit, 
when doubts descend on one dismally, when one's 
soldiering seems nothing but a contemptible vanity, 
indulged in largely to keep the respect of lookers-on. 
And, of course, cowardice of that sort, a small pinch 
of it anyway, did help to make most of us brave. 
There was the love of adventure, too, the longing 
to be in the great scrum — the romantic appeal of 
" The neighing steed and the shrill trump " — all 
the glamor and illusion of the violent thing that has 
figured forever in books, paintings, and tales, as the 
supreme earthly adventure. . . . But beneath all 
these impulses, like a tide below waves, there lies 
also a world of much deeper emotion. It is a love of 
peace, really, a delight in fairness and faith — an 
inherited joy in all the traditional graces of life, and 



72 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

in all the beauty that has been graced by affection. 
It is an emotion, an impulse, for which the word 
" patriotism " is a term far too simple. It is an im- 
pulse defined precisely, without suppression, blur, or 
excess, in the flowing lines I have quoted. One 
fights for the sake of happiness — for one's own hap- 
piness first of all, certain that did one not fight one 
would be miserable forever — and then, in the sec- 
ond place, for the quiet solace and pride of those 
others, spiritual and mental sons of ours, if not actu- 
ally physical — the men of our race who will de- 
pend for so much of their dignity upon the doings 
of the generation before. War is a boastful, beastly 
business; but if we don't plunge into it now, we 
lower the whole pitch of posterity's life, leave them 
with only some dusty relics of racial honor. To 
enter into this material hell now is to win for our 
successors a kind of immaterial heaven. There will 
be an ease and splendor in their attitude towards 
life which a peaceful hand would now destroy. It 
is for the sake of that spiritual ease and enrichment 
of life that we fling everything aside now to learn 
to deal death. 



Taken by permission from "Men of Letters," by Dixon 
Scott. Published by George H. Doran Company. 



FERDINAND BELMONT 

I met an old man at Stow-on-the-Wold 
Who shook and shivered as though with cold. 

And he said to me: "Six sons I had, 
And each was a tall and a lively lad." 

" But all of them went to France with the guns, 
They went together, my six tall sons." 

— Wilfrid Gibson. 

Ferdinand Belmont, called "A Crusader of 
France," was a young French doctor who asked to 
serve in the ranks. He was rapidly promoted to a 
captaincy, received the Cross of the Legion of 
Honor, and was three times cited in army orders. 
He was twenty-four years old when he was " killed 
in action." Three brothers of the young captain, 
called in succession, have also been killed, and the 
youngest brother is now serving. 

His letters written to his parents are distinguished 
among the war letters by their spiritual quality : their 
philosophy and piety, and also filial devotion, per- 
haps to-day a little old-fashioned and provincial — 
except in France. To illustrate the quality of the 
letters and the character of the writer, Henry Bor- 
deaux tells the story of the old Savoyard peasant 
who, when the news came of the death of his second 
73 



74 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

son, said " God found them ready " — and went on 
with his plowing. 

The young captain discusses the war with the 
clear detachment that is especially characteristic of 
the French. The war is horrible but to be gone 
through with. He draws the same distinction be- 
tween the Germans and the French as Barbusse in 
his novel " Under Fire," and says the Germans are 
soldiers while the French are men. But it is the 
simple, absolute religious faith of the letters that 
gives to them their special value. This is revealed 
in every letter. The writer seems to have only two 
ideas, one to do his duty, and the other to trust God 
— not the Kaiser's particular friend, but " the good 
God, who is the God of every one." One may re- 
call with some amusement that in 1870 Bismarck's 
wife sent to him a Bible, fearing he would not be 
able to find one in France, and marked Psalms i. 6: 
" The way of the ungodly shall perish." 

{Letter of Ferdinand Belmont) 

Ah ! we have just spent a few more hard days. I 
have had two companies, and one of them my own, 
to send into action under difficult and painful con- 
ditions. The business is now over and I must thank 
God it did not end worse. . . . 

I often think that this agitated life, full of emo- 
tions, is very enviable, and that it responds admirably 
to the proud ambitions of young men who would do 
and see everything — those who feverishly demand 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 75 

" to live their life," according to the common and 
fatal phrase. 

It is true : I believe that of all this, if we survive 
it, we shall retain an enchanted and almost voluptu- 
ous recollection. I am sure that those who, evacu- 
ated from the front, move towards the rear, must 
quickly experience a feeling of dullness and medi- 
ocrity, and regret what they have left behind. 

But this also may be an illusion. . . . For every 
life is beautiful and precious when well employed. 
It is not imposed events, not the frame which forms 
the value of an existence, but the soul which reacts 
and adapts itself to exterior conditions. Life is to 
be measured by man's capacity; circumstances in 
themselves signify nothing, we ourselves give them 
their color. 

Why, therefore, say we are atoning for the inertia 
of preceding generations ? In this immense crucible, 
the world, time and space are melted. Into this 
infinitely complex mechanism, this intricate chemical 
process, we are thrown atom against atom. What 
will come out of the whirlwind? God alone knows. 
But what does the knowledge of these elements so 
diverse and so complex matter to us? For God is 
there. Let us be in His hand like matter in that of 
the artist. Each stroke with the chisel gradually 
rough-hews and refines us, rids us of our original 
coverings and brings us towards perfection. Ah! if 
we only knew how to let ourselves be chiselled by 



76 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

our Maker. Our crime — the crime of ignorance 
— is that we know not how to commit ourselves to 
Him. It is as though the block of marble revolted 
against the sculptor. 

What reflections the emotions of these days of 
war would inspire, if the days most fraught with 
emotions were not precisely those on which you 
possess the least freedom of mind! It is better so, 
however, for action alone can save us from ourselves. 

Your letters have been, as they always are, a 
great comfort to me. Therefore, how I should love 
to merit your great affection and do something really 
meritorious in proof of my gratitude ! But that debt 
I shall never pay. May God aid me to do my duty 
with docility and humbleness until the time He has 
fixed. Humility ! — the great and strong and beau- 
tiful virtue. 



Taken by permission from " A Crusader of France," by 
Captain Ferdinand Belmont. Published by E. P. Dutton & 
Company. 



" ONE YOUNG MAN " 

The " One Young Man " of the letters collected 
by J. E. Hodder Williams in England is called 
Sydney Baxter, although this is not his real name. 
He is described as being, or as having been, a drab, 
unheroic London clerk, pale and spectacled and 
droop-shouldered, of the kind Wells likes to portray. 
Sydney Baxter was, in fact, the last man any one 
would expect to be a soldier. When the war came, 
at first he did not associate himself with it at all. 
It was entirely out of his world. In his office he 
was called " Gig-Lamps," because of his glasses. 
He did not know one end of a gun from another, 
nor the smell of powder from cologne. He knew 
nothing of sports of any kind until he joined the 
Y. M. C. A., and became an enthusiastic member of 
that organization. He had a mother dependent 
upon him — well now you know the kind. 

But Sydney Baxter went to the war. Perhaps he 
did not " mirthfully hasten," but it did not take him 
long to understand that here was a case for indi- 
vidual responsibility ; and his mother said she would 
" manage somehow." After nearly two years of 
fighting, he was wounded in nine places at the first 
battle of the Somme. Mr. Williams in his intro- 
duction to the letters says: " He is, as I write, 
waiting for a glass eye ; he has a silver plate where 
77 



78 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

part of his frontal bone used to be; is minus one 
whole finger, and the best part of a second. He is 
deep-scarred from his eye-lid to his hair. I can tell 
you he looks as if he had been through it. Well, he 
has." 

The letter this " One Young Man " wrote to his 
employer telling of his " blighty," and his return to 
England, is said to be treasured as " the pluckiest 
piece of writing that has ever reached this office." 

{Letter of " One Young Man ") 

July 4th, 19 16. 

Have unfortunately fallen victim to the Hun shell 
in the last attack. I am not sure to what extent I 
am damaged. The wounds are the right eye, side 
of face, and left hand. They hope to save my eye, 
and I have only lost one finger in hand. 

I will write, again, sir, when I arrive in England. 
At present, am near Dieppe. 

Taken by permission from " One Young Man," edited 
by J. H. Hodder Williams. Published by George H. Doran 
Company. 



ALEXANDER DOUGLAS GILLESPIE 

Books, flowers, birds, children, cats, kittens — it 
seems as if everything, except war, were in the letters 
of Douglas Gillespie — a Scotchman to be guessed 
by his name. His trench garden is his joy. He 
sends home for nasturtium seed. He wanders knee- 
deep in mud after violets. He transfers flowers — 
although " it seems a pity " — from the gardens of 
the ruined villages to his trench. Where others 
have written about the mud and the rats and the 
cooties, this young Scotchman writes about madonna 
lilies. As for the mud, he quoted one of his High- 
landers : " That's the way I like ma parritch, weel 
thickened. " 

There were two Gillespie brothers, and both went 
to the war. At Winchester and later at Oxford, 
one had taken all the honors in sports, apparently, 
and the other in scholarship. Douglas Gillespie, ac- 
cording to high authority, was " one of the most dis- 
tinguished men of his generation." The brother 
was killed in the first fighting in the pursuit at the 
Marne. Douglas Gillespie was killed in September, 
191 5, leading the charge of his men in the face of a 
terrific fire near La Bassee. He was the only officer 
to reach the German trench, where he was seen to 
fall. He was twenty-six. 

Douglas Gillespie was one of the many young 
79 



80 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

Britishers who apparently entered the war with no 
hate for any one. He wrote, soon after the news 
from Belgrade: " I don't want to fight the Ger- 
mans, for I respect them, but if the country is 
drawn in, I feel I must go in too, and do the best I 
can." But things soon happen which change his 
respect into horror, and make him eager to go 
through with it. " War at the best is a bloody busi- 
ness," he writes, " and it is only by sticking to the 
few rules that men have agreed to keep that we can 
prevent ourselves from descending lower than the 
beasts; fighting like the two devils in the ' Inferno,' 
who fell back into the lake of pitch biting and tear- 
ing one another with their nails." 

He is soon convinced that " the traditions of all 
the centuries behind us " are at stake, and there must 
be no failure. " For if we fail, we shall curse our- 
selves in bitterness every year that we live, and our 
children will despise our memory." In his own 
case, there w r as not much chance for failure. He 
writes to his father: " When a man is fighting in a 
war like this, the news is always good if his spirit 
does not fail, and that I hope will never happen to 
your son." 

In the last letter written just before the attack in 
which he lost his life, he finds support in the thought 
that so many of his friends, who have fallen in the 
months before, will charge in spirit by his side. His 
brother Tom, Rupert Brooke, G. L. Cheesman the 
historian, Arthur Heath, young Gladstone (" fortu- 
nate because he can give a name as well as a life for 
the cause he believes in"), Balfour, Marion Craw- 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 81 

ford (the novelist's son) — are some of the names 
appearing in the letters, with the methodical foot- 
note, " killed in action." 

{Letter of Douglas Gillespie) 

Trenches, September 24, 1915. 
My Dear Daddy: 

Before long, I think we shall be in the thick of 
it, for if we do attack, my company will be one of 
those in front, and I am likely to lead it ; not because 
I have been specially chosen for that, but because 
some one must lead, and I have been with the com- 
pany longest. I have no forebodings, for I feel that 
so many of my friends will charge by my side, and 
if a man's spirit may wander back at all, especially 
to the places where he is needed most, then Tom 
himself will be here to help me, and give me courage 
and resource and that cool head which will be needed 
most of all to make the attack a success. For I 
know it is just as bad to run into danger as to hang 
back when we should push on. 

It will be a great fight, and even when I think 
of you, I would not wish to be out of this. You 
remember Wordsworth's " Happy Warrior " : 

Who if he be called upon to face 

Some awful moment to which heaven has joined 

Great issues, good or bad, for human kind, 

Is happy as a lover, and is attired 

With sudden brightness like a man inspired. 



82 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

Well, I never could be all that a happy warrior 
should be, but it will please you to know that I am 
very happy, and whatever happens, you will remem- 
ber that. 

Well, anything one writes at a time like this, 
seems futile, because the tongue of man can't say all 
that he feels — but I thought I would send this 
scribble with my love to you and Mother. 

" Letters from Flanders," written by 2nd Lieut. A. D. 
Gillespie, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, to his home 
people. With an appreciation of two brothers by the Right 
Rev. the Bishop of Southwark. London: Smith, Elder & 
Co. 



HAKRY BUTTERS 

Harry Butters, R.F.A., was a California boy who 
enlisted with the English army at the beginning of 
the war, and was killed in the fighting on the Somme 
at the age of twenty-four. Like Victor Chapman, 
he was one of fortune's favorites. He was wealthy 
and good looking. Not since Rupert Brooke have 
men and women written about any one with so much 
admiration and affection. Radiant, dazzling, fas- 
cinating are words used to describe him. He could 
drive any kind of a car, and was sure he could master 
a flying machine in a week; he was an expert polo 
player, and was all that these things imply. He 
went to school in England. And yet it is said that 
it was not because of loyalty to England, but belief 
in a cause in regard to the right of which he never 
wavered, that determined him to enter the war. 
He believed that the Joker, as he said, in the Ger- 
man deck of cards, was going to be the little word 
Right. He hoped that his own country would enter 
the war, and if it did, he would like to " get in a 
few licks " under the Stars and Stripes. 

He had no doubts as to the ultimate outcome of 
the war, although he seemed to have a clear realiza- 
tion of what was ahead of the Allied armies. He 
believed in a decisive military victory over the enemy, 
and was impatient with the premature talk of peace. 
83 



84 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

The last thing in the world he wants to do, he says, 
is to die, but in one of his last letters, containing in- 
structions what to write to his sister, he says: 
" Please reiterate to her how much my heart was in 
this great cause, and how much more than willing 
I am to give my life to it. Say all the nice things 
you can about me, but" (and this is underscored) 
" no lies." 

In an appreciation of the " Life and Letters of 
Harry Butters," Mr. J. L. Garvin, editor of the 
London Observer, has picked out the one particu- 
larly choice letter, and it was not hard to choose. 
No letter of the war has reached a greater height of 
understanding and faith and high purpose. It is a 
remarkable letter for a boy of twenty-three to write, 
and puts some of the rest of us, not so clear-eyed, 
to shame. Mr. Garvin calls it a magnificent letter, 
and says it will serve on both sides of the Atlantic 
as the confession of faith of an American citizen in 
the great war. Especially the phrase, " honorable 
advancement of my own soul," Mr. Garvin thinks 
is one that should live. The letter was written after 
the big offensive of September, 1915 : 

(Letter of Harry Butters) 

France, September, 1915. 

. . . And now, just a word to reassure you, my 

dearest folks, and to lessen, if possible, your anxiety 

on my account. I am now no longer untried. Two 

weeks' action in a great battle is to my credit, and 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 85 

if my faith in the wisdom of my course or my en- 
thusiasm for the cause had been due to fail, it would 
have done so during that time. 

I find myself a soldier among millions of others 
in the great Allied Armies, fighting for all I believe 
to be right and civilized and humane against a power 
which is evil and which threatens the existence of 
all the rights we prize and the freedom we enjoy, 
although some of you in California as yet fail to 
realize it. It may seem to you that for me this is 
all quite uncalled for, that it can only mean the 
supreme sacrifice for nothing or some of the best 
years of my life wasted, but I tell you that not only 
am I willing to give my life to this enterprise (for 
that is comparatively easy, except when I think of 
you), but that I firmly believe if I live through it to 
spend a useful lifetime with you, that never will I 
have an opportunity to gain so much honorable ad- 
vancement for my own soul, or to do so much for 
the cause of the world's progress, as I have here 
daily, defending the liberty that mankind has so far 
gained for himself against the attack of an enemy 
who would deprive us of it and set the world back 
some centuries if he could have his way. 

I think less of myself than I did, less of the 
heights of personal success that I aspired to climb, 
and more of the service that each of us must render 
in payment for the right to live and by virtue of 
which only can we progress. 



86 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

Yes, my dearest folks, we are indeed doing the 
world's work over here, and I am in it to the finish. 
" Delenda est Germania ! " is our faith. " For God, 
for Liberty, for Honor," the call that so many have 
answered, if not all from as far as I. 

Back me up, all of you, my nearest and dearest, 
and write to me often to show that you do. 
Always and forever, 

Most devotedly 
H. A. B. 



Taken by permission from "Life and Letters of Harry 
Butters, R.F.A." Edited by Mrs. Denis O'Sullivan. Ap- 
preciations by J. L. Garvin and Colonel Winston Churchill. 
Published by John Lane Company. 



" A TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN " 

In the first months of the war, after Mons, the 
Germans used to say that all the officers of the con- 
temptible little British army had been killed, and 
they would not be able to produce any more. This 
probably explains why an English soldier signs his 
letters " A Temporary Gentleman," his belief ap- 
parently being that even a temporary British officer 
and a temporary English gentleman — like himself 
— who was an auctioneer's clerk before the war 
came and made him an aristocrat — are more than a 
match for " the goose-stepping Germans in the 
kaiser's Prussian Guard." 

This " Temporary Gentleman " is the son of a 
widow in Brixton. He had a small sister. At fif- 
teen, he left school and mounted a stool in the office 
of an auctioneer and real estate agent. In his first 
letter written from France he says : "I wonder if I 
ever should have seen it had there been no war! " 
Well, that, in a way, explains him. The most 
traveling done in his family is an annual two weeks' 
vacation at a seaside village. They were enjoying 
such a vacation when the war came and spoiled it. 
It was annoying. Vacations are brief and precious. 
But it was not long before the auctioneer's clerk had 
enlisted, and a little family in Brixton was entitled 
to a service flag with one star. 
87 



88 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

" And I used to think," he writes from the 
trenches, " that the pattern of my neckties made a 
difference to our auctions!" When he is finally 
wounded, he catalogues himself in the language of 
the auction room : " One full-size, extra heavy 
Temporary Officer and Gentleman; right arm and 
left leg slightly chipped, the whole a little shop worn, 
but otherwise as new. Will be sold absolutely with- 
out reserve to make room for new stock." He adds : 
" They have to keep as many beds as possible vacant 
in Clearing Stations, you know." 

Of the many tributes paid to the British Tommy, 
the Temporary Gentleman's is one of the finest and 
the most sincere. He says the English soldier is the 
" same color all the way through," and this color 
he seems to think is the true blue of the genuine 
aristocrat : 

(Letter of " Temporary Gentleman JJ ) 

. . . And with it all, mind you, they're so Eng- 
lish. I mean they are kind right through to their 
bones; good fellows, you know; sportsmen, every 
one of 'em; fellows you'd trust to look after your 
mother. They're as keen as mustard to get to the 
strafing of the Boches ; but that's because the Boche 
is the enemy, war is war, and duty is duty. You 
couldn't make haters of 'em, not if you paid 'em 
all ambassadorial salaries to cultivate a scowl and 
sing hymns of hate. Not them. Not all the pow- 
ers of Germany and Austria could make baby killers, 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 89 

women slayers, and church destroyers of these chaps 
of ours. If I know anything about it, they are fine 
soldiers, but the kaiser himself — " kayser," they call 
him — couldn't make brutes and bullies of 'em. 
Warm their blood — and, mind you, you can do it 
easily enough, even with a football in a muddy field, 
when they've been on carrying fatigues all day — 
and, by Jove! there's plenty of devil in 'em. God 
help the men in front of them when they've bayonets 
fixed ! But withal they're English sportsmen all the 
time, and a French child can empty their pockets and 
their haversacks by the shedding of a few tears. 

Taken by permission from " A ' Temporary Gentleman ' 
in France." With introductory chapters by Captain A. J. 
Dawson. Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. 



NORMAN PRINCE 

At the time of the visit of the French envoys to this 
country, at a meeting in Boston, at which Frederick 
H. Prince was chairman, the eloquent M. Viviani 
said: "I salute that young hero, Norman Prince, 
who has died having fought not only for France, but 
for America, because we have the same ideals of 
right and liberty." 

Norman Prince was the founder of the Escadrille 
Americaine, later the famous Lafayette Flying 
Squadron, that has so chivalrously and nobly paid 
its country's debt to France for Lafayette and 
Rochambeau. Only two of the original squadron, 
at this writing, still live. One thinks of these young 
aviators, who immediately upon the outbreak of the 
war, volunteered their services to France, as not 
unlike the emblematic winged figures seen in many 
paintings, leading the armies, well on ahead, and 
pointing the way. 

Norman Prince was educated abroad, and at 
Groton and Harvard. After being graduated with 
honors from the academic course at Harvard, he 
attended the law school. He went to Chicago to 
begin the practice of his profession, but was greatly 
interested in flying and spent much time with the 
Wright Brothers. He played polo and hunted and 
was keenly interested in every kind of sport. When 
90 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 91 

the accident occurred, which resulted in his death, 
and both his legs were broken, he told the surgeons 
to be sure and not get one of his legs longer than the 
other, because, as his French mechanic wrote to his 
parents, " il faisait beaucoup le sport." 

It was after an aerial raid on a German munition 
center that Norman Prince died from a skull frac- 
ture. He was returning from the battle in the 
air, and was trying to make a landing in the dark, 
when his machine struck a cable stretched above the 
trees. Both his legs were broken. The skull frac- 
ture was discovered two days later. He was not yet 
thirty. He won the Croix de Guerre, the Medaille 
Militaire, and the Croix de la Legion d'Honneur. 
His letters are slight, but show great devotion to 
the cause of the Allies, and especially to France and 
to his friends of the Lafayette squadron. 

{Letter of Norman Prince) 

June 26, 19 16. 
Dear Mama: 

Poor Victor Chapman ! He had been missing for 
a week, and we knew there was only a very remote 
chance that he was a prisoner. He was of tre- 
mendous assistance to me in getting together the 
Escadrille. His heart was in it to make ours as 
good as any at the front. Victor was brave as a 
lion and sometimes he was almost too courageous — 
attacking German machines whenever and wherever 
he saw them, regardless of the chances against him. 



92 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

I have written to Mr. Chapman — a rather difficult 
letter to write to a heart-broken father. Victor was 
killed while attacking an aeroplane that was coming 
against Lufbery and me. Another unaccounted for 
German came up and brought Victor down while he 
was endeavoring to protect us. A glorious death — 
face a l'ennemi and for a great cause and to save a 
friend ! 

Your affectionate son 
Norman. 

Taken by permission from " Norman Prince." Memoir 
by George A. Babbitt. Published by Houghton Mifflin & 
Co. 



VICTOR CHAPMAN 

It is curious how quickly some names become legen- 
dary, and they are suddenly associated with every- 
thing that is beautiful and heroic. Rupert Brooke, 
the poet, had no sooner died on the Gallipoli expedi- 
tion than a whole fund of story grew up about his 
name, which has become at once as familiar and as 
remotely unreal as that of some fabled knight or 
hero. The same is true, in hardly less degree, of 
Alan Seeger, the American poet in the Foreign 
Legion who was killed in France, and of Victor 
Chapman, the young American aviator who was 
killed at Verdun. It is easy enough to say that the 
" legend " grows out of youth or beauty or genius 
or wealth or even death, which alone transfigures. 
But the legend to persist, as it does with some names, 
must have started with truth. 

The name of Victor Chapman deserves to be 
legendary, and his story to be told and retold, as 
are the stories of heroes, since it embodies the best 
of America. He was one of the fortunate youth. 
He was graduated from Harvard in 191 3. He was 
studying at the Beaux Arts in Paris when the war 
broke out. He said he " guessed he would enlist." 
He enrolled with the Foreign Legion the first month 
of the war. He was a year in the trenches, and 
fretted at the inactivity. He wished he was in avi- 
93 



94 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

atfon. In one letter he has a plain grouch. He is 
sure that he will be transferred to the aviation, 
"just before this company goes into action and 
makes a brilliant attack " ; or that the war will end, 
" just before I get my license and go to the front " — 
with the American Escadrille. 

But luck, as he would have called it, favored him. 
After a brief training, he at last is able to be " do- 
ing something actively for France, instead of just 
toying with her expensive utensils." He was killed 
at Verdun, on June 23, 1916, and fell within the 
German lines. He was twenty-six. The story of 
how he met his death, plunging headlong to the res- 
cue of his companions suddenly attacked by the Ger- 
man machines, and how he was carrying in his own 
machine a basket of oranges for a friend in the hos- 
pital, has already been told many times, and has 
become one of the legends. 

If the character can be read in personal letters, 
Victor Chapman would have been the first to smile, 
if not to grumble, at being called a hero. Nothing 
could be imagined more modest and direct and sim- 
ple and furthest removed from " noble " than he 
reveals himself in his letters — "not written for a 
large and admiring public, since they are not the 
right kind of thing." He chafes at the idea of the 
family worrying about him. He has the honest 
boy's abhorrence of a fuss. Instead of telling his 
people to be brave when they worry about him, he 
flatly tells them not to " take the edge off " from his 
own complete contentment in doing for the first 
time in his life something " worth while." 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 9 5 

(Letter of Victor Chapman) 

Halloween, 19 15. 

I get the idea that you — and Alee especially — 
are wearing yourselves out worrying and praying 
about the danger I am in, or were rather, when I 
was at the front, and will again when I return. 
It's all very parental and I appreciate it, but I wish 
you would not because it rather takes the edge off, 
and principally because it does not benefit me or 
any one. This is the first thing I have ever done 
that has been worth while, or may ever do, and you 
might just as well get the benefit of it without the 
heart-wringing worry. . . . Why not take the good 
and leave the bad ? It is easier to pilot an aeroplane 
than drive an auto when you get on, and far less 
dangerous than the autoing I used to do daily at 
Cambridge. . . . 

This flying is much too romantic to be real modern 
war with all its horrors. There is something so 
unreal and fairy like about it, which ought to be 
told by poets, as Jason's Voyage was, or that Greek 
chap who wandered about the Gulf of Corinth and 
had giants try to put him in beds that were too 
small for him. . . . 

Every one says they get tired of flying, " It's too 
monotonous." I don't see it, but on the contrary, 
an infinite variety is this, when there is a slight 
sprinkling of clouds. Clouds are not thin pieces of 



96 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

blotting paper; but liquid, ceaselessly changing steam. 
I played hide-and-seek in and out them yesterday; 
sometimes flat blankets like melting snow on either 
side below me, or again, like great ice floes with 
distant bergs looming up, and " open water " near 
at hand, blue as a moonstone cloud, floating full, for 
all the world like gigantic jelly-fish (those that have 
red trailers and a sting). In the nearer pools, the 
mottled earth, pie-bald with sun and shadow, showed 
through; and it was thanks to these I knew my 
whereabouts. I was going from below the clouds to 
above them, circling in some hole ; thus I realized the 
size and thickness of the walls, — 300 meters sheer 
from top to base of dazzling whiteness. Some have 
many feathery, filmy points and angles, others are 
rounded and voluminous, with cracks and caverns 
in them. These are all the fair-weather, fleecy 
clouds; for there are the lower, flatter, misty ones, 
and the speckled, or mare's tail clouds, above which 
one never reaches. There are such a lot of trumpet- 
shaped and wind blown clouds this evening that I 
should like to go out and examine them; but it's a 
bore for my mechanic, and I doubt if I could go 
high enough to warrant crossing the lines. 

Your loving 
Victor. 



Taken by permission from "Victor Chapman: Letters 
from France," with memoir by John Jay Chapman. Pub- 
lished by the Macmillan Company. 



ALFRED EUGENE CASALIS 

Under the wide and starry sky, 

Dig the grave and let me lie. 
Glad did I live and gladly die, 

And I laid me down with a will. 
— Robert Louis Stevenson's " Requiem." 

Alfred Eugene Casalis was born on February 24, 
1896, in South Africa, where his parents were mis- 
sionaries. He himself intended to follow in their 
career, and when the war came was in the Theo- 
logical Seminary at Montauban in France. He was 
eighteen. 

He immediately began to search himself — most 
seriously for a boy of his years, to discover whether 
he has " a heart vibrating enough to fight for others, 
and not merely to ' save his own skin' " ; whether 
he is quite decided to be a " champion of right, of 
justice, and of liberty." He says: " It is all very 
well to be a pacifist, but under some circumstances 
nothing can hold one back." 

He does not wait for his class of 191 6 to be called. 
On January 7, 1915, he writes: " I am a soldier 
of my own free will." He describes how he looks 
in a dirty and ragged uniform with the coat much 
too big for him — as the French soldiers' coats were 
likely to be, especially in the early days of the war. 

His letters are full of France, of the France of 
97 



98 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

to-morrow, " the divine France that is bound to be." 
He is willing to die for this France. He asks for 
Stevenson's " Requiem," which he says he would like 
to translate. Like Stevenson, this French boy also 
wrote prayers. 

He was in the general offensive at Artois in May, 
191 5, and was killed in a bayonet charge — a boy 
full of tender thoughts and piety. He was nineteen 
when he fell on the Field of Honor. 

(Letter of Alfred Eugene Casalis) 

For me the military life has simplified everything. 
Things have taken on their true values and full sig- 
nificance. Some difficulties which seemed insur- 
mountable have disappeared. Intellectual sacrifices 
which I thought I could never accept have taken 
place almost of themselves, without a pang. And 
there results a new vitality, a desire for intense ac- 
tion. And then, there is always peace. However, 
I fear this peace both for myself and for those I love, 
because too often it is only human. By this I 
mean that it is weakness and resignation, in place 
of being the full consciousness of a positive duty 
and a real force. And I often pray as follows for 
myself and for those I love: 

Lord, our God, our loving Father, stir up our 
souls in order that they may not be like stagnant 
waters. Do not permit us to sleep in a cowardly 
security, in a lifeless calm, believing that it is peace. 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 99 

On the other hand, give our hearts the power to 
suffer intensely in communion with all grief, to 
revolt against all injustice, to be thrilled by the ap- 
peal of every noble and holy cause. Lord, our 
Christ, thy Son suffered. He wept over the death 
of His friend. He wept over Thy rebellious peo- 
ple. He wept over His work which threatened to 
end with His earthly life. But He lived so in- 
tensely and humanly that He was able to say to us 
men, " I am the life." Lord, make our hearts alive. 
Then will the peace descend upon them, not as the 
snow which numbs and freezes, but as the warmth 
of the sun which revives the sap in the very veins 
of the earth. O Lord, may thy Peace be with us; 
thy peace and not the peace of men. Amen. 

Taken by permission from " For France and the Faith," 
by Alfred Eugene Casalis. Translated by Warren Edwin 
Bristol. Published by the Association Press. 



" R. A. L.," CANADIAN STRETCHER- 
BEARER 

And gentlemen in England now a-bed, 
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here; 
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks 
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. 

— Henry V. 

The interesting thing about the letters of a Cana- 
dian stretcher-bearer, " R. A. L.," are the author's 
own honest and changing reactions to the war. At 
first he is very sure he was not intended to be a sol- 
dier. But he seems to realize that somehow or other 
he has got to go, and join " the elite of the world." 
When the boys return, he is afraid " it will not be 
good for the chaps who stayed at home." The time 
comes when he is sure he will not want any of the 
stay-at-homes around his house! He writes this to 
his young wife, to whom the letters are addressed, 
and he adds: " My God, to think I nearly forebore 
to wear the khaki ! " 

He begins by doing orderly work in one of the 
base hospitals. His work as an orderly is not ex- 
actly pretty. " Can you see me doing it? " he asks, 
adding with pride, " and doing it right." He says: 
" Any one who would kick at having to wait on and 
work for those fellows, after what they have gone 
through, isn't worth much." 
ioo 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 101 

Finally, he cannot wait for the draft to come to 
him but goes to meet it. The list is full, but they 
take off one man and put him on. He is in the 
battle at Vimy Ridge. " It was the biggest day of 
my life." He was ahead of the tanks. The tanks 
were too slow for this Canadian. Each brigade 
went over the top of the other. He wonders what 
Canada thinks now. " Our splendid Canadians," 
indeed ! The day after the battle he writes to his 
wife : " It is a wonderful day. Easter Monday — 
everybody so smiling and happy." 

Alan Seeger said that after the war there would 
be only two kinds of men: those who had been at 
Verdun and those who had not. The Canadian 
would doubtless add — and Vimy Ridge. His let- 
ters are natural and spontaneous, slangy and boyish, 
manifestly honest and without " heroics." He says 
modern warfare is not heroic, anyway, and he even 
doubts if war ever was : 

{Letter of " R. A. L./ J Canadian Stretcher- 
Bearer) 

This war is so " different." In any other war 
we might talk of " our noble cause," " the clash 
of arms," " death or glory," and all that kind of 
thing; but this one is so vast, one wee atom of a 
man so small, the chance for individuality coming 
out so remote, that it has developed, for a single 
Unit, into merely a job of work to be done: eat, 
sleep, and work. You don't fight; you can't call 



102 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

dodging shells, machine-gun bullets, and bombs, 
fighting; it's fighting all right, when you " go over." 
But a single battalion doesn't go over so very often, 
even at the Somme. I wish I could make you 
" get " the atmosphere. " Heroics " are dead here, 
a charge is not the wonderful, glorious thing we 
were told it was. I have even begun to wonder if 
it ever was, or if the poets and historians and 
" Press agents " of those days have been just kid- 
ding us. 

No one wants to go into the trenches, yet no one 
(who is any one) would dodge out of it. Every 
one wants a soft Blighty wound, with the chance 
of getting to where there are no whizz bangs, and 
you go to bed every night. Every man I have 
spoken to: German, French, English, Canuck, are 
sick to death of it; yet to quit without a definite 
decision is out of the question, and no one would 
think of it. And how on earth am I to tell you not 
to worry and all that; how on earth is a husband 
(like me) to write to a wife (like you) about his 
feelings on and before going into the front line of 
a war like this? None of us are heroes. To read 
of " Our Splendid Canadians " makes us ill. We 
are just fed up, longing for the end, but seldom 
mentioning it, and hoping — when we think of it — 
that when we do get it — it will be an easy one, or 
something final. Our main effort is to think and 
talk as little of the war as possible. The mail is 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 103 

far the most important thing ; the next, " What's 
the job to-day?" Of course newspapers are anx- 
iously bought up — but we know the newspapers 
don't tell us much. And the thing is so big anyway 
that no one can possibly grasp even a fraction of it. 
There is one new thing I've learned, and that is 
that it won't be good for a chap who stayed at 
home, when the boys return. The thing is just a 
bit too serious. 

Taken by permission from " Letters of a Canadian 
Stretcher-Bearer," by R. A. L. Published by Little, Brown 
and Company. 



" MY LITTLE NEPHEW " 

The woman author of some " Letters from 
France " has a number of brothers in the war, and 
no less than thirty-six cousins, but it is " my little 
nephew " who catches the imagination. He stands 
out heroic, stands out in a way, it may be guessed, 
that this young gentleman would greatly approve and 
enjoy. Conrad's uncle, Mr. Nicholas B., who was 
with Napoleon and ate the Lithuanian dog, is hardly 
a more gallant figure than this French boy. He is 
a direct descendant from D'Artagnan. To get to 
the front he had to run away from home and con- 
ceal himself in a military train. He was only six- 
teen and a half. In one of the letters we learn 
that the little nephew has been wounded — in both 
feet. He will not be crippled — " he says he is 
sure "; but he is " very much vexed to be wounded." 
And, of course, he would be! In one of the first 
letters to his aunt he wrote: 

(Letter from "My Little Nephew'') 

Everything here is extraordinary, and made espe- 
cially to please me ! 

Over there the bullets whistle, the shells hum and 
burst : they fire off guns, and we cry out some rough 
104 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 105 

language to the Boches who are entrenched twenty 
meters in front of us. 

From time to time an aeroplane flies over our 
heads ; the cannon bombard it and the machine guns 
attack it. You can imagine how I amuse myself ! 

Taken by permission from " Letters from France," by 
Jeanne le Guiner. Published by Houghton Mifflin & Com- 
pany. 



JEAN RIVAL 

Jean Rival was a Grenoble boy, the son of a col- 
lege professor. He was nineteen when he fell on 
the field of honor. He was leading his section in 
an attack, and fell dead with a bullet in his head. 
It was Rival who led his men to the attack with the 
cry : " Forward, boys, with the bayonet, for the 
French women, our sisters! " He lies buried in Al- 
sace, the Alsace of which he writes: ''Land of 
Alsace that I love as dearly as my own Dauphine! " 

Like so many young Frenchmen, and youth every- 
where, Jean Rival was in love with life. But he 
was more in love with France. In a letter written 
to a relative he says to tell his parents that he died 
" facing the enemy and protecting France with my 
breast." Nor does he want to be pitied. He tells 
his friends not to say " poor Jean," in speaking of 
him. He tells them to say " dear Jean," or " brave 
Jean," or even " little Jean," but not " poor Jean," 
He does not want to be pitied for doing his duty 
with the rest of his comrades. 

Masefield, the poet, has said of France: " If all 
the men of France are killed, the women of France 
will remain. If the women of France are killed, 
the children of France will remain. And if the chil- 
dren of France must die, the dead of France will rise 
again." The story is told that one young French 
1 06 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 107 

officer, in a desperate moment when all had fallen 
around him, cried : " Arise, ye dead men ! " And 
the wounded struggled to their feet. 

{Letter of Jean Rival) 

I feel within me such an intensity of life, such a 
need of loving and being loved, of expanding, of 
breathing deeply and freely, that I cannot believe 
that death will touch me. Nevertheless, I well 
know that the role of commander of a company is 
extremely perilous; to lead men to battle is to elect 
oneself to be shot. Many have fallen; many will 
still fall. I have just heard of the death of several 
of my friends who only recently arrived at the 
front as aspirants. If this should happen to me, I 

count on you, my dear J , to console my parents. 

You will tell them that I died facing the enemy, 
protecting France with my breast, and that it is not 
in vain that they brought me to my twentieth year, 
since they have given one defender to France. Tell 
them that my blood has not been shed in vain, and 
that the many and painful sacrifices of individual 
lives will save the life of France. . . . 

" Les Diverses Families Spirituelles de la France," par 
Maurice Barres. Paris: Emile-Paul Freres. 



LESLIE BUSWELL 

Happy are all free peoples, too strong to be dispossessed, 
But blessed are those among nations who dare to be strong 
for the rest. 

Before America entered the war, the American 
Ambulance Field Service in France, together with 
those who joined the Foreign Legation, represented 
the country's conscience. " Ambulance No. 10 " is a 
single record, which could be multiplied many times, 
of the devoted service of young America to France. 
The driver of " Ambulance No. 10 " was Leslie 
Huswell, a young Harvard student, who has received 
the coveted Croix de Guerre. 

The simplicity and genuineness of these letters, 
the eagerness of the writer to be of service, his sym- 
pathy for the fighting men, his bewilderment at the 
war and horror of its cruelties — all make them 
memorable. An example of his earnestness is seen 
in the letter describing a dinner in the trenches on 
the French fete day of July 14, when he was asked 
to sing the American national anthem, and " got 
up and did so as loud and as heartily as I knew 
how." 

"Ambulance No. 10" operated in the neighbor- 
hood of the much fought over Bois-le-Pretre, and 
carried about 7,500 wounded a month ; steady driv- 
ing considering the capacity of the " little cars." 
108 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 109 

In one letter, the author writes, " I carried over 
forty wounded yesterday a distance of one hundred 
and sixty kilos." And in another letter, he says: 

{Letter of Leslie Buswell) 

... It was a sad trip for me — a boy of about 
nineteen had been hit in the chest and half his side 
had gone — " tres presse," they told me — and as 
we lifted him into the car, by a little brick house 
that was a mass of shell holes, he raised his sad, 
tired eyes to mine and tried a brave smile. I went 
down the hill as carefully as I could and very 
slowly, but when I arrived at the hospital I found 
I had been driving a hearse, and not an ambu- 
lance. . . . 

It made me feel pretty bad — the memory of that 
faint smile which was to prove the last effort of 
some dearly beloved youth. All the poor fellows 
look at us with the same expression of appreciation 
and thanks; and when they are unloaded, it is a 
common thing to see a soldier, probably suffering 
the pain of the damned, make an effort to take the 
hand of the American helper. I tell you tears are 
pretty near sometimes. 

Taken by permission from " Ambulance No. 10," by Les- 
lie Buswell. Published by Houghton Mifflin & Co. 



WILLIAM YORKE STEVENSON 

One of the heroes of the war is the " little car." 
It has become endowed with a kind of personality. 
All the ambulance drivers write affectionately of 
their " flivver," their " Tin Lizzie," their " Henry," 
as they variously call it. In the Foreign Legion 
every man is supposed to have a comrade de combat 
who always goes with him into action. The little 
car is the ambulance driver's comrade de combat. 

The little car has been decorated with the Croix 
de Guerre. When the famous Section I of the 
American Ambulance service was to receive the 
Croix de Guerre, the French general bestowing the 
decoration announced that since the section had no 
regimental standard, he would " decorate " the car. 

" It was a flivver! " says William Yorke Steven- 
son. " Just a plain flivver, the after overhang of 
which gave the outfit the graceful aspect of an over- 
fed June bug." The Croix de Guerre is in the top 
corner of the flag; an eagle is in the center; there 
are three stars, indicating the number of times the 
section has been cited; and there are the names: 
Ypres, Dunkerque, Somme, Verdun, Argonne, Aisne 
— a proud record for the little car. 

William Yorke Stevenson, of Philadelphia, drove 
the famous Ambulance No. 10 in 19 15, on the 
Somme and at Verdun. This is one of the ten 
no 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" in 

first American ambulances of the American Field 
Service, the gift of a New York woman in 19 15, 
and driven by Leslie Buswell in that year at Pont- 
a-Mousson. Ambulance No. 10 is no longer in the 
service. It is invalided. Mr. Stevenson thinks it 
should not be permitted to end on a scrap heap, but 
should be preserved in a museum. 

Mr. Stevenson was financial editor of a Philadel- 
phia newspaper, when early in 19 16 he went to 
France and volunteered in the ambulance service. 
He has been in command of the celebrated Section 
I, and has himself received the Croix de Guerre. 
He says when he first went to France, the deeper 
and more serious aspects of the war did not par- 
ticularly appeal to him. But, later on, he writes, 
" France gets a sort of grip on you, and one begins 
to want to stay and see it through." 

(Letter of William Yorke Stevenson) 

For history's hushed before them, 
And legend flames afresh ; 
Verdun, the name of thunder 
Is written on their flesh. 

— Laurence Binyon. 

July 2, 191 6. 
The Germans made an attack near Vaux and our 
" tir de barrage " stopped it. We drove past some 
one hundred guns, " 75's " and " 105's," whose 
muzzles project over the road, and when they fire 
as we pass in an incessant " tir rapide," the noise is 
enough to break the ear-drums. I stuff cotton in 



ii2 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

my ears and keep my mouth open. The sheets of 
flame come half across the road, and the concussion 
has even broken some of the windows in the cars. 
. . . The " tir de barrage " is alone worth crossing 
the ocean to see. A solid line of flame several kilo- 
meters long, crowned by exploding shrapnel and all 
kinds of colored lights and flares and a noise so 
deafening as to make one's head reel and one's brain 
stop working. There were eleven hundred guns 
working just as fast as they could (about twenty- 
five shots a minute) for an hour in the space of 
about two square miles. No words of mine can 
do justice to that " tir de barrage " across the Etain 
road. I have been scared in my life, but never like 
that. The German " incomers " one regards as 
luck. One hears the warning whistle and thinks 
it's coming right at one, and it falls one hundred 
yards away. Again one hears the whistle and re- 
gards it as distant — and she blows up right beside 
one. There's a cheerful uncertainty that means bad 
luck if one's hit; but when obliged to drive in 
front, within twenty feet, of those 75's, and others, 
with the flame apparently surrounding you, and un- 
able to hear or think for the stunning noise, you 
don't know whether the motor is going, and you also 
wonder where the wads are going. They alone are 
enough to kill a man. You also hope the gunners 
are on to their job, as some new recruit might aim a 
foot too low! Then, occasionally, a badly timed 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER'' 113 

shot bursts at the muzzle, which means exactly above 
the car. Believe me, I'd rather take a chance with 
the erratic " Germ " incomers than to have to pass 
that often. If I get out of this without being per- 
manently deaf, I'll be lucky. 

Taken by permission from " At the Front in a Flivver," 
by William Yorke Stevenson. Published by Houghton 
Mifflin & Co. 



" CAMION LETTERS " 

No picture of the great war has appealed more to 
the imagination and given a better idea of its gigan- 
tic operations than the unending procession of the 
huge army trucks, crawling like a mammoth cater- 
pillar over muddy, deeply rutted and continually 
shell-swept roads; traveling at night without lights, 
and carrying night and day munitions and food and 
other supplies to the army. The transport service 
has been called the backbone of the army. If this 
is so, it is interesting to know that some American 
college men have been a very important part of this 
backbone. 

The first American flag authorized to be borne in 
the war was carried by a unit of college men, most 
of them from Cornell University, in the first trans- 
port section of the American Field Service in France. 
With the exception of the aviators, the college men 
were the first armed American force in Europe. 
They originally volunteered for the ambulance serv- 
ice. But when they arrived in France, instead of 
the little cars, they were asked to drive the big five- 
ton munition trucks instead, which the French call 
" camions." 

Although it was not unlike agreeing to buy a 
Thrift Stamp and being asked to subscribe to a Lib- 
erty Bond instead, almost without exception, the 
114 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER " 115 

men willingly agreed to the transfer, and regarded 
it only as that " bit more," expressed by one of them 
who, when writing home of his promotion, said: 
" I want you to know how lucky I am and that so 
far I've done my duty and that bit more which 
counted." The general feeling appears to have 
been that anything that France wanted had to be 
done. " After my experience with the submarine," 
one of the boys writes, " and learning practically 
at first hand the enemy that not only France, but 
the United States, has to deal with, and seeing the 
tremendous sacrifice going on about me without 
quailing, I feel that any sacrifice of personal desires 
that I make is infinitely trivial." 

Although most of the camion drivers are very 
young, young enough to have an inordinate appetite 
for chocolate, apparently, and a great desire for a 
mouth organ, the issues of the war are clear to them. 
One of the most serious of the " Camion Letters " 
expresses an abhorrence of war equal to the most 
unyielding pacifist's. But this is the very simple 
and not at all complex reason why he is glad that 
his country is in the struggle which it is hoped will 
end militarism and its evils forever. The writer 
of the letter is R. A. Browning, of Cornell: 

(Camion Letter) 

Paris, May 6, 191 7. 
What has impressed me most during my short 
stay here is the earnestness of the French people in 
the present conflict; their willingness to sacrifice 



n6 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

everything for the great cause which they have been 
upholding since the beginning of the war. . . . 

It is indeed a great consolation to me now, more 
so than I ever imagined it would be, to know that 
the United States is at last a participant in this 
awful affair. It is indeed a miserable affair and a 
pity that the whole world should be required to 
turn from the ordinary pursuits of life and peace to 
those of war. But for a long time a war against 
oppression, crime, and frightfulness has been waged 
for us, and we have reaped the " benefits " in money. 

Thank God we can now lift up our heads and 
square our shoulders again! The Stars and Stripes 
again mean what it meant in '76 and '12 and '61 — 
it stands for honor and peace and humanity even 
though the price be war. I long for the day when 
our first American troops land in France to fight 
shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the world 
against selfishness and greed ; and when this war is 
over, as I pray it soon will be, may America, my 
country, take the initiative in the movement for an 
alliance of nations, a world federation so organized 
that war will no longer be possible. Do not think 
that mine is a schoolboy patriotism. I despise a 
fight as such ; I despise war — as such. We — the 
United States — are fighting against war, not for it. 

Taken by permission from " Camion Letters." Introduc- 
tion by Martin W. Sampson. Published by Henry Holt 
and Company. 



A FRENCH MRS. BIXBY 

Mrs. Bixby was the mother of five sons, who, as 
Lincoln wrote in his treasured letter, died gloriously 
on the field of battle. There is a French mother, 
however, who having already lost eight sons in the 
war, sent forth the last. Her letter should become 
as famous as Lincoln's. The boy's sisters wrote the 
letter to him, at their mother's dictation. Like the 
old woman in the Synge play, it would seem that 
with all her sons gone this French mother too might 
at last sleep o' nights. 

{Letter of a French Mrs. Bixby) 

I hear that Charles and Lucien were killed on 
the twenty-eighth of August. Eugene is seriously 
wounded. As for Louis and John, they are dead 
also. Rose is missing. Mamma weeps. She says 
for you to be brave and go to avenge them. I hope 
your chief will not refuse to let you do this. John 
had the Legion of Honor. Succeed him. They 
have all been taken from us. Out of eleven who 
went to the war, eight are dead. My dear brother, 
do your duty. One only asks this of you. God has 
given your life to you; he has the right to take it 
back. It is Mamma who says this. 

Thy Sisters. 

" Lettres du Front," by Victor Giraud. Revue des Deux 

Mondes. 

117 



A LITTLE MOTHER 

Helene Payeur is the name of the writer of the 
following letter. She is fifteen. Her father, until 
he joined the colors, was a forestry guard in the 
neighborhood of Raon. Helene became separated 
from her mother, and was alone with her little sis- 
ter, aged seven, and her brother, aged five, in the 
storm center of a great battle. It was a month 
before the mother was able to rejoin the little fam- 
ily. But how it " managed " is told in the letter: 

{Letter of a Little Mother) 

Forestry House of Cenimont 

near Sainte-Barbe. 
Monsieur: 

I am hurrying to answer your letter which I 
have received with pleasure. I may tell you that 
we are all home. Mamma, from w T hom we were 
separated in the battle of August 25, returned on 
September 21 ; she had been as far as Soutenay. As 
for me, I went as far as Sainte-Barbe with her, 
there I remained a day and a night, until the Ger- 
man troops arrived. We carried off our best linen 
and our cow. When Sainte-Barbe was burned, 
118 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 119 

they insisted upon letting the cow burn too, and 
would not let me save it. 

I was alone with Rita and Robert for an hour, 
during which time they never stopped crying. You 
could not hear each other because of the noise of the 
cannon and the bullets. The Germans wanted to 
keep me from going through, but finally permitted 
me on account of the children. 

I reached Baccarat on the other side of the for- 
est. But a battle starts up, and I fall on the ground 
from fear of the bullets. I kept on going, in spite 
of the refusal of the Germans. I reached la Cha- 
pelle when a big battle broke out, beyond Thiaville. 
I went on all the same. I arrived at the house and 
found it completely looted. I immediately started 
in to clean it, in order to be able to stay in it. I 
had nothing to eat, but finally the Prussians re- 
turned to get their dinner at our house, and made 
us eat with them. They had our other cow killed. 
It was a nuisance, for our cow was in the stable, 
and the horse was hidden in the ditch at the end 
of the road. It was necessary for me to hide all 
that in being cross-examined by the officers. They 
took our rye and our corn, which was not yet cut. 
They forbade me to bring it in. They took all our 
underwear for their wounded and we have nothing 
to put on. Rita and Robert are going barefoot. 
They took all our potatoes, and I had nothing to 
say. 



120 "THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

I was anxious because I did not know where 
Mamma was. All is sad at this time for us, because 
we have to work hard with no pay. It is three 
months since I have seen a sou. Finally, if I told 
you all, I should never be done. 

We have had news of Papa, and he tells us that 
he is well; but he does not tell us where he is. 
Mamma saw him at Gicourt, when he left for the 
north. 

As for the little hunting lodge, nothing is left 
but the fireplace; the windows are broken, and 
there are many German graves all about. We have 
still some bedding, but happily because we hid it 
in the forest with a feather bed. The forestry 
house is burned, also that of Miclo and of Marchal. 

Our little dog has disappeared, and we do not 
know what was his end. . . . 

"L'Arae franchise et la guerre," par Maurice Earres. 
Paris: Emile-Paul Freres. 



JEAN GIRAUDOUX 

Nothing was too good for a French soldier in those 
first thrilling days in August, 19 14, when Mulhouse 
(not Mulhausen) was in the headlines, and the 
French flew towards the lost provinces like homing 
pigeons. In front of every doorstep stood pails of 
wine and sweet drinks and baskets of food. There 
were flowers for every man and gun. The doors 
of the houses stood wide open, even at the back, so 
you could see right through, writes Lieutenant Jean 
Giraudoux. It was a time of great joy and great 
emotion. The little children " adore us," and cry 
" Vive la France," in a throaty fashion — " as if it 
hurt." But it is to the French women, who made 
a living hedge all along the line of route, to whom 
their gallant countryman pays an interesting trib- 
ute: 

{Letter of Jean [Giraudoux) 

O French women of the railway stations, how 
you all are remembered! All along our route, at 
every stop of the train, absolutely belonging to us, 
the slaves of each one of us, running from the rail- 
road track to the town — that was down hill — 
to fill twenty canteens, which were empty when 
they took them and weighed twenty kilos on their 
121 



122 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

return — that was up hill; not able to keep from 
giving two pieces of chocolate to every man — in- 
stead of one — and in despair at having twice run 
out too soon of their supply; bourgeoises, peasants, 
little girls with their English governesses — radi- 
ant, freed since yesterday of a frightful doubt in 
regard to England — all passing in and out of our 
lives as people in the lives of famous travelers: the 
teacher, every one of whose pupils had written and 
signed a little letter of good cheer for the soldiers ; 
the butcher's wife, whose stock was sold out, who 
thought suddenly of her jams, and flew to her cup- 
boards; dark young girls, thin, devoured by the war, 
at a mining station, who changed for us the first 
five franc note, this French money that they had 
planned to keep always as a souvenir; the shy 
cousins who noiselessly half opened the door of our 
silent car, about two o'clock in the morning, and 
trembled with joy to see it suddenly awake, jump 
out on the graveled platform, bury in knapsacks the 
chocolate, of which they proudly named the brand, 
because it was so dark; fair statue, with the golden 
head, who scrutinized and recognized each face, 
and refused to give me a second glass of wine, when 
I stood in the line again; the wife, who looked on 
at the others, without helping, under the shining 
acacias, helpless in her grief, yet who wanted to 
see us, and at first refused to tell us, whether because 
of her agony or fear, her husband's regiment, and 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 123 

sobbing aloud when it was at last confessed — a liv- 
ing hedge of women, right up to the frontier, all 
within a few yards of us — except the young girl of 
Montceaux who would never come near — rising 
above the track of the train, rising above their own 
lives, above their own modesty, ready also to die 
— and defying the fast express. . . . 

" Retour d'Alsace," par Jean Giraudoux. Paris: Emile- 
Paul Freres. 



YVONNE X- 



If there are any who feel horror at the thought of 
young French boys charging with fixed bayonets, 
and shouting: "Forward! forward! with the bayo- 
net, for the French women, our sisters! " they should 
read the story of Yvonne X . 

Yvonne was one of the many thousands of girls 
deported from Lille to do agricultural work for the 
Germans. Consistent with their eminent frankness 
and fairness, the Germans announced the deporta- 
tions in advance. The inhabitants of Lille were 
warned not to leave their homes between eight 
o'clock in the evening and six in the morning. 
(The shameful work was appropriately to be done 
in the dark.) The people were told to prepare 
their baggage of linen and blankets and kitchen 
utensils, weighing so many pounds. And finally 
they were benevolently advised to obey orders and 
11 remain calm ! " 

Yvonne X was one of the forty-eight of the 

6000 young women deported from Lille, whom the 
German government finally charitably permitted to 
return to their homes, after the whole world had 
risen in horror at the abominable thing that had 
been done. She kept a diary, which was printed in 
the Revue des Deux Mondes. Some of it is hardly 
quotable. After traveling in cattle cars, and arriv- 
124 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 125 

ing at their destination, the girls were not immedi- 
ately turned into the fields to do the alleged neces- 
sary planting. On the contrary, some of the girls, 
the better looking ones, were taken before medical 
officers, stripped and vilely inspected. When 
they protested against the " work " that they then 
learned was to be assigned to them, they were told 
again to be " calm " and not make a fuss, since they 
were " all French and all alike." Those who were 
put to work in the fields were lashed when they 
halted in their labors. They were starved. 
Yvonne's story of how the Germans, in their method- 
ical selection of those who were to be deported, 
street by street, finally halted before her own door, is 
dramatic: 

(Letter of Yvonne X ) 

... At four o'clock, I awoke with a start. 
They were ringing at the door of our neighbors. 
Mamma, with whom I share a room, jumped out 
of bed. " Here they are! " Mamma had scarcely 
said the words, when, under our windows, we heard 
the noise of boots and the tap-tap of rifle butts on 
the pavement. Our bell rang furiously. Shall we 
refuse to open ? Impossible. By order of the mili- 
tary government, one must always open to Ger- 
mans. If one refuses, there is punishment or 
prison. My mother goes down stairs. She finds 
herself confronted by seven soldiers. " Madame, 
how many persons live here?" "Three: myself, 



126 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

my two daughters." A soldier consults the list of 
people in the house that has to be posted in every 
corridor. " Show them, madame." But before 
Mamma was able to prevent him, the Boche enters 
my room. I was still in bed. The man asks me: 
" Are you Mademoiselle Genevieve? " " Yvonne," 
corrects Mamma. " Mademoiselle, get up ! The 
officer will be here in five minutes." . . . The five 
minutes are hardly passed, when the officer arrives. 
Ten men accompany him, with fixed bayonets. . . . 
" You have twenty minutes to get ready." . . . The 
twenty minutes are barely up, when the soldiers' 
rifle-butts are heard in the vestibule, and they shout 
up in a loud voice: " Mademoiselle, hurry up! 
hurry up! It is time to go." Mamma blesses 
me. " Be brave, my child, try to comfort those 
around you." We kissed each other, and parted 
without tears. . . . 



" Emmenees en esclavage, pour cultiver la terre. Jour- 
nal d'une deportee," par H. Celarie. Revue des Deux 
Mondes. 



CHARLES PEGUY 

Charles Peguy was the idol of young France. 
For many years he was the editor of Les Cahiers de 
la Quinzaine, a unique publication in Paris, print- 
ing literary, political and documentary works as 
separate books; in the Cahiers originally appeared 
Romain Rolland's long serial novel, " Jean Chris- 
tophe." 

Peguy was also a poet. He was the son of a 
workingman and the grandson of peasants, and his 
faithfulness to the soil of his ancestors, Pierre de 
Lanux says, " was like France's herself." Maurice 
Barres says of Peguy that his whole life was " an 
assault on the German positions." 

Peguy went gayly off to the war as a lieutenant of 
reserve with his section of infantry. He was killed 
at the Battle of the Marne, and thus is named with 
those heroes who in September, 1914, saved Paris 
and France and perhaps the world. For a lieuten- 
ant, he was " a chic type," one of his men said of 
him. He had no fear. His death, a« described by 
one of his men, is cited in France as an example of 
how her heroes die: 

(The Death of Charles Peguy) 

The young and clear voice of Lieutenant Peguy 
directs the fire ; he is standing behind us, courageous 
127 



128 " THE GOOD SOLDIER s> 

under the shower of shrapnel, cadenced to the in- 
fernal tap-tap of the Prussian machine-guns. 

This terrible race through the oats has taken our 
breath away, sweat drowns us, and our brave lieu- 
tenant is in the same predicament. A brief moment 
of respite, then his voice trumpets to us, " Ad- 



vance 



f " 



Ah! this time it is no laughing matter. Climbing 
the slopes, and lying flat on the ground, bent double, 
in order to offer less target to the bullets, we rush 
to the attack! The terrible harvest continues, 
frightful; the song of death hums around us. The 
hundred meters are thus made; but to go further 
for the moment, it is madness, a general massacre, 
not more than ten of us will arrive! Captain 
Guerin and the other lieutenant, M. de Cornilliere, 
are killed dead. " Lie down ! " cries Peguy, " and 
fire freely! " but he himself remains standing, field 
glasses in his hand, directing our fire, heroic in the 
inferno. 

We shoot like madmen, black with powder, the 
gun burning the fingers. At each moment there 
are cries, groans, significant death rattles; dear 
friends fell at my side. How many are dead? 
One counts no longer. 

Peguy is always standing, in spite of our cries 
to " Lie down! " glorious madman, in his bravery. 
The most of us no longer have any sand bags, lost 
at the time of the retreat, and a bag at this time is 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 129 

a precious shelter. And the voice of the lieutenant 
keeps on crying: " Shoot! Shoot! For Gods 
sake!" Some complain: "We have no bags, 
Lieutenant ; we shall all be killed ! " " That doesn't 
matter. Neither have I any bag, do you see? 
Keep on firing! " And he stands up as if to defy 
the shrapnel, seeming to summon the death that he 
glorified in his verse. At the same time a murder- 
ous bullet crashes the head of this hero, shatters his 
noble and beautiful countenance. He fell without 
a cry, having had, in the recoil of the barbarians, 
the ultimate vision of a near victory ; and when, one 
hundred meters farther on, I take a wild look back, 
I see down there a black spot in the midst of so 
many others, stretched lifeless, on the warm and 
dusty ground, the body of this hero, of our dear 
lieutenant. 

"Avec Charles P6guy," par Victor Boudin. Paris: Li- 
brairie Hachette. 



LOUIS KEENE 

Louis Keene is another of " those Canadians," one 
of the 3,500 Canadian volunteers, who enlisted in 
the first days of the war, and were in England 
before the Germans could say their equivalent for 
Jack Robinson. Louis Keene is an artist. He was 
sketching with his father in Canada, when he was 
sent for by a Toronto paper to return to make war 
cartoons. But it was not long before he was over 
there, and the captain of a machine-gun section, and, 
as we must believe, an artist at that job, too. 

In a description of No Man's Land, he quotes 
from the diary of a German soldier, killed at Hooge, 
in August, 1915- He wonderingly says of the 
German: " He was writing his diary at the same 
time I was writing mine." They were both in the 
sharp fighting around the salient at Ypres. 

{Letter of Louis Keene) 
A trip to No Man's Land is an excursion you 
never forget. It varies in width and horrors. My 
impression was similar to what I should feel being 
on Broadway without my clothes — a naked feeling. 
Forty-seven and one-half inches are necessary to stop 
a bullet, and it's nice to have that amount of dirt 
130 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 131 

between you and the enemy's bullets. The dead 
lie out in between the lines or hang up on the 
wire; they don't look pretty after they have been 
out some time. It's a pleasant job to have to get 
their identification disks, and we have to search the 
enemy dead for papers and even buttons so that we 
can know what unit is in front of us. . . . 

I managed to get a diary kept by a German sol- 
dier who fell on the field. It gives the point of 
view of a man in the trenches on the other side of 
the line. He was writing his diary at the same time 
I was writing mine. . . . 

"July 17th. Marched to new quarters. We 
have got a new captain. He wants to see the com- 
pany, so at 8 A. M. drill in pouring rain. Four 
times we have to lie on our belly and get wet 
through and through. All the men grumbling and 
cursing. At eleven we are dismissed, I, with a bad 
cold and a headache. I wish this soldiering were 
over. 

" August 4th. At every shot, the dug-outs sway 
to and fro like a weather-cock. This life we have to 
stick to for months. One needs nerves of steel and 
iron. Now I must crawl into a hole, as trunks and 
branches of trees fly in our trench like spray. 

" August 6th. The smoke and thirst are enough 
to drive one mad. Our cooker doesn't come up. 
The 126th give us bread and coffee from the little 
they have. If only it would stop! We get direct 



i 3 2 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

hits one after another and lie in a sort of dead end, 
cut off from all communication. What a feeling to 

be thinking every second when I shall get it. 

has just fallen, the third man in the platoon. Since 
eight the fire has been unceasing: the earth shakes 
and we with it. Will God ever bring us out of 
this fire! I have said the Lord's prayer and am re- 
signed. . . ." 

Taken by permission from " Crumps," by Louis Keene. 
Published by Houghton Mifflin & Co. 



CAPTAIN GILBERT NOBBS 

In a preface to a book describing his war experi- 
ences, Captain Gilbert Nobbs, plucky Britisher, 
says: " This is my first book. It is also my last." 
He is blind. 

Captain Nobbs was five weeks on the firing line. 
For four weeks he was mourned as dead, and later 
received a bill from his solicitor " for services re- 
garding the death of Captain Nobbs." Three 
months he was a prisoner of war in Germany. 

The British captain was leading his men in a 
charge when catastrophe overwhelmed him. He 
was yelling to his men: " Get ready to charge, they 
are running. Come on! Come on!" He jumped 
out of the shell hole, and his men followed. He 
was hit in the head. The bullet emerged through 
the center of his right eye. The optic nerve of the 
other eye was affected. He was blind. 

At the same time he says he did not lose con- 
sciousness. But he had an odd experience, in which 
he went down into the valley and came back. Call 
it an hallucination, a trick of the brain, or what 
we will. Captain Nobbs merely records the inci- 
dent. His own belief, he says, he will keep to him- 
self. But whatever it was, for him there is no 
longer any mystery about death ; nor does he dread 
it. 

133 



134 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

He insists that he does not deplore the loss of 
his sight, and that he can say in all sincerity that he 
was never happier in his life. His head may be 
bloody, but it is unbowed. And he is alive ! 

(Letter of Captain Gilbert Nobbs) 

Even the loss of God's great gift of sight ceases 
to become a burden or affliction in comparison with 
the indescribable joy of life snatched from death. 

There are men, and we know them by the score, 
who are constantly looking out on life through the 
darkened windows of a dissatisfied existence; whose 
conscience is an enemy to their own happiness; who 
look only on the dark side of life, made darker by 
their own disposition. 

Such men, and you can pick them out by their 
looks and expression, who build an artificial wall of 
trouble, to shut out the natural paradise of exist- 
ence; these men who juggle with the joy of life 
until they feel they would sooner be dead, do not 
know, and do not realize the meaning of life and 
death with which they trifle. 

Let us think only of the glory of life; not of the 
trivial penalties which may be demanded of us in 
payment, and which we are so apt to magnify until 
we wonder whether the great gift of life is really 
worth while. 

Let us not think of our disadvantages but of those 
great gifts which we are fortunate enough to pos- 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 135 

sess ; let us school ourselves to a high sense of grati- 
tude for the gifts we possess, and even an affliction 
becomes easy to bear. 

Here I am, thirty-six years of age, in the pride of 
health, strength, and energy, and suddenly struck 
blind. 

And what are my feelings? Even such a seem- 
ing catastrophe does not appall me. I can no longer 
drive, run, or follow any of the vigorous sports, the 
love for which is so persistent in healthy manhood. 
I shall miss all these things, yet I am not depressed. 
Am I not better off, after all, than he who was 
born blind? With the loss of my sight, I have be- 
come imbued with the gift of appreciation. What 
is my inconvenience compared with the affliction of 
being sightless from birth? 

For thirty-six years I had become accustomed to 
sights of the world and now, though blind, I can 
walk in the garden on a sunny day; and my imag- 
ination can see it and take in the picture. 

I can talk to my friends, knowing what they look 
like, and by their conversation read the expression 
on their faces. I can hear the traffic of a busy 
thoroughfare, and my mind will recognize the scene. 
I can even go to the play; hear the jokes and lis- 
ten to the songs and music, and understand what is 
going on without experiencing that feeling of mys- 
tery and wonder which must be the lot of him who 
has always been blind. 



136 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

And the greatest gift of all, my sense of gratitude, 
that after passing through death, I am alive! 

Taken by permission from " On the Right of the British 
Firing Line," by Captain Gilbert Nobbs. Published by 
Charles Scribner's Sons. 



WOUNDED 

M. Maurice Barres, who since the beginning of 
the war has been almost a postoffice department in 
himself in collecting and preserving the letters of 
the French soldiers, quotes the following letter writ- 
ten by a little Frenchman, so young, as he says, as 
hardly to be more than a child. M. Barres seems 
to like this letter particularly, possibly because of 
its mention of Deroulede — " cet ancien " as the 
youngster calls him — and of Lorraine. M. Bar- 
res is himself from Lorraine, and he often takes 
delight in writing Lorraine-Alsace instead of the 
usual way. As much as to the Louvre or Notre 
Dame or Napoleon's tomb, or any of the other sights 
of Paris, tourists flock to see the statue of Strasbourg 
in the Place de la Concorde, always with the mourn- 
ing wreaths heaped about its base — which, accord- 
ing to this little Parisian, are to be changed to palms 
of glory: 

(Letter of a Wounded) 

Papa has already written me of having seen you 

and told you the news about me. How I should 

like to have been in his place and told you myself, 

for I am sure that he will have exaggerated the lit- 

137 



138 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

tie I have done. Papa is proud of having his son 
wounded. But he is not as proud as I am. If you 
knew how it gave me a sensation of pain, but, if 
I can so express it, of happy pain. I was glad to 
be wounded, I, who dreamed so often of suffering a 
little for France, and the thought gave me strength, 
the will to get well as soon as possible, in order to 
go back to rejoin my comrades who are still fighting. 

Do you know, it bores me to be inactive, I still 
have the thirst for battle. I must still have my 
little revenge, apart from the great revenge which 
we are all in the way of preparing. . . . How one 
has a good conscience and a tranquil spirit while 
feeling the bullets and the shells flying around one, 
and saying to oneself: " It is for France! " One 
must be on the battlefield to see how well she is de- 
fended, how all her children meet and fight with a 
song on their lips, courage in their hearts. It is so 
beautiful to feel this great patriotic breeze pass over 
you, and when the tri-color is unfolded, one no 
longer lives, one runs to meet death. It rushes 
like a hurricane past you, and one finds oneself mar- 
veling, transformed: one is a man, one is a French- 
man. 

Ah! We shall soon have with us again our 
Alsace-Lorraine brothers, and we shall no longer go 
to the statue of Strasbourg to place mourning 
wreaths there, but palms of glory and of gratitude. 
Alas! Deroulede will be missing. But it doesn't 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 139 

matter. He knew how to make thousands of De- 
rouledes, the beautiful youth of France, and in sou- 
venir of " this elder," we have given ourselves body 
and soul to France. 

God and France ! Here is our motto. The one 
protects us, and we defend the other. Is it not a 
glorious mission? And if by chance I should be 
left on the battlefield, think of a little Frenchman, 
a little Parisian, who surrendered his soul, happy in 
the thought of a greater France ! 

, " L'Ame franchise et la guerre," par Maurice Barres. 
Emile-Paul Freres, editeurs. Paris. 



HUMPHREY COBB 

When he was nineteen, and before America entered 
the war, Humphrey Cobb, of New York, went 
abroad to serve with the English army in France. 
He was born in Italy and lived there until he was 
fourteen, although when he was nine he started go- 
ing to an English school. It was his feeling for his 
school and his friends over there that made him 
eager to help in the Allied cause. He enlisted in 
Canada. 

Some of Humphrey Cobb's letters are amusingly 
young — and some are alarmingly old. In one let- 
ter, he is begging for sporting sheets and baseball 
scores, and in another is telling gravely of things 
perhaps no boy, as Kipling says of Dicky Hatt — in 
"The Pride of His Youth "— should be expected 
to know. 

Humphrey Cobb's letters are written to his 
mother. Almost every letter expresses a great con- 
tentment at being in the war. He seems to know 
that the war is the big event of his generation, and 
he writes that those who will have missed it will 
always be " out of it." In his last letter, written 
just before starting for France, he says: " What I 
would have missed, if I had not enlisted!" The 
following letter was written from a training camp 

in England: 

140 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 141 

(Letter of Humphrey Cobb) 

July 17, 19 1 7. 

. . . You know, mother, sometimes I can hardly 
believe that I am in England again ; England where 
every spot is historic and the whole land is beautiful. 
England, a great camp of soldiers, a nation at war, 
the heart of the world. And it seems strange to 
think that below the horizon is glorious, magnificent 
France; and beyond her beautiful Italy — the land 
of poetry, art and love. 

Good God, mother, what an experience this is! 
What men I run up against and get to know! 
What stories of roving lives I have heard. What 
tragedies and comedies I have seen, and into what 
lives and characters I have had a glimpse. And 
even this is child's play to what we will see, hear 
and experience in France. Thank God, I have not 
missed it! It is all big, mother, nothing petty or 
small. And the greatest thing of this life is its per- 
petual and recurrent humor. How blue we all get. 
How happy we are, how we swear, how we laugh. 
I wish you could have seen our hut this morning, 
when the news came up that some other hut had 
taken our breakfast as well as theirs. " Well, I'll 
be damned if I'll go on parade or work if I don't 
get fed ! " was about all you could hear, and the 
funny part of it was they all went on parade the 
same as usual and lived through it in spite of threats 



142 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

to drop dead in the ranks from lack of food. They 
won't do this, and they won't do that, but they al- 
ways do it when the time comes. 

. . . One request — about the end of September 
and the beginning of October the world's series will 
begin — that is baseball games between the leading 
teams of the American and National League. If 
you can find out when they begin will you save all 
the sporting sheets of every day during the series, 
but should you overlook them, as your inexperience 
in the sporting pages might lead you to do, just get 

the scores from some one, Uncle or Uncle 

, and they will tell you which came out on top 

and that will do just as well. 

Communicated. 



EDMUND YERBURY PRIESTMAN 

The story of Edmund Yerbury Priestman reflects 
glory on the Boy Scouts. He was a young Scout- 
master in Sheffield, England, who received his com- 
mission in October, 19 14. His letters are published 
under the title " With a B. P. Scout in Gallipoli." 
He died at Suvla Bay. He died defending an ad- 
vanced post for which he had volunteered. It was 
the kind of an advanced post in which the men run 
forward, at night, with sandbags, and try to dig 
themselves in before the enemy's guns can reach 
them. In this case the Turks rushed the position. 
Lieutenant Priestman did not retire, but opened fire, 
and held the enemy back for a time, until a second 
rush, when the little band was overcome. The en- 
tire lot, thirty of them, was wiped out clean as a 
slate. The position so heroically defended has been 
named " Priestman's Post." 

Edmund Priestman was twenty-five when he was 
killed. His letters are boyish and full of fun, and 
are illustrated with his own sketches, which are 
clever and humorous. The spirit of the letters is 
indicated in the incident when two of the subalterns 
" thought it was one of our party and so were pre- 
pared to jeer." If the motto of the Boy Scouts is 
" for life or death Be Prepared," surely the motto 
for the young Englishman at war is " for life or 
143 



144 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

death be prepared to jeer and be jokey." But young 
Priestman also had his serious moment and a fine 
talent for descriptive writing as seen in the follow- 
ing letter: 

(Letter of Edmund Yerbury Priestman) 

A Trench, 
August 27th, 1915. 

The small boy who used to try and say the 
twenty-third Psalm all in one breath never guessed 
that he would ever experience what that " Valley " 
really could be like; but having spent two hours in 
it last Saturday afternoon, he's going to try and 
describe his experiences. 

You must try and imagine us (at about the time 
many of your local " knuts " were leaving for the 
cricket-ground or golf links) squatting on our 
haunches in a shallow and dusty trench, listening 
to the most appalling uproar you could dream of. 
Behind us our big guns are roaring, above us the 
shells are tearing through the air, and in front of 
us, all up the long valley ahead, the crash of their 
bursting is simply deafening. Somewhere (all too 
vaguely described to us) are three lines of Turkish 
trenches which must be taken to-day. . . . 

Can you picture the feeling of all of us as we 
watch the minute-hand slowly creep towards three? 
Ten minutes only now. Now only seven. And 
what of us all when that hand shall have touched 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 145 

the half hour . . . ? The dentist's grisly waiting 
den, the ante-room to the operating theater — these 
multiplied a thousandfold in their dread anticipa- 
tion. 

And now the moment has come. A whistle 
sounds — a scramble over the trusty parapet we 
have learned tc know as a shield for so many hours, 
and the valley is before us. " Whiss ! whissss ! " 
The air is full on every side with invisible death. 
" Whisss! phutt! " A bullet kicks up a little spray 
of dust from the dry gray earth underfoot, another 
and another to left and right. The sensation of 
terror is swallowed up in an overwhelming convic- 
tion that the only possible course is forward — for- 
ward at any cost. That is what we have been tell- 
ing ourselves all through the long waiting, and that 
is our only clear impression now. Forward — and 
we instinctively bend as one does to meet a hail- 
storm, and rush for it. 

Beyond the rough plowed ground over which we 
are advancing lies a low, thick belt of brambles and 
bushes. Here, for a time, we can lie under cover 
and regain our breath for a second rush. The 
man on my left stumbles and comes down with a 
crash and a groan. Only an instinctive catch of the 
breath, and the old conviction — forward at all 
costs — swamps all other sensations. 

Down we go behind the kindly shelter and 
" Whisss ! whisss ! " the bullets flow over us. . . . 



146 " THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

. . . Two more rushes over the open and I find 
only three of my men left to follow me. The oth- 
ers are not all hit, of course; many have got isolated 
with other parties. We are all wondering where 
on earth we are by now, as we've certainly advanced 
quite seven hundred yards, and no trench yet! 

Finally, a rush takes us into a long narrow ditch 
where we are safe from the bullets. . . . 

Dusk is falling, and we are preparing to spend the 
night in our safe retreat when a rustling comes 
from up the ditch. I grip my rifle and prepare for 
action. The sound comes nearer and I challenge 
it. " Friend," comes the feeble reply, and down 
the trench there crawls what was once — only a 
few hours ago — a man, and now. ... It is hard 
to tell the poor fellow that I can do nothing for 
him, but he is beyond all help now and he knows it. 
A drink of water helps matters and he lies back, 
as comfortable as I can make him, and asks quietly 
for a "woodbine!" Oh, you splendid British 
Tommy — not even to be daunted by those hideous 
explosive bullets we all know so well by now — 
there must be some Power behind you that lends 
you who suffer courage and we who have "come 
through " the conviction that such courage can only 
be on the side of right and justice. 

As night falls, it is decided that I should take a 
message back to the Brigadier to report where our 
party is dug in, so I slip my revolver into my pocket 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 147 

and set out. . . . That's the whole story. What 
we gained and lost that day form no part of it — 
the papers will show all that some time. . . . 

Taken by permission from " With a B. P. Scout in Gal- 
lipoli," by Edmund Yerbury Priestman. Published by E. 
P. Dutton & Co. 



THE MARSEILLAISE 

Allons, enfants de la patrie, 
Le jour de gloire est arrive. 

"The luckiest musical composition ever promul- 
gated," Carlyle calls the Marseillaise. And the 
German poet, Klopstock, said more when on one 
occasion he said to its author, Rouget : de Lisle: 
" You lost us 30,000 Germans." The Germans, in 
fact, think so well of the Marseillaise that they have 
always claimed that the tune at least was made in 

But* we who have never heard the Marseillaise 
when " the blood runs " and the " flag is in danger 
apparently have never heard it at all. It may be 
we Americans do not know our Star Spangled Ban- 
ner either, since few of us have ever heard it when 
more than its top notes were in danger. # 

It was after some particularly violent fighting, 
when "the river was as red as the soldiers 
breeches," that a young French gunner unnamed, 
wrote the description which is quoted by M. Victor 
Giraud, author of " La troisieme France, published 
by the Librairie Hachette in Pans. 

(The Marseillaise Letter of a Gunner) 

Where we were, by the light of the firing, we 
could see the battlefield very distinctly, and never 
148 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 149 

shall I see anything more fantastic than the thou- 
sands of red legs, in close rank, that charged; the 
gray legs commenced to tremble (they do not like 
the bayonet) ; the Marseillaise kept on, and the 
bugles sounded the charge, and our cannons kept on 
spitting. Finally, our infantry closed with the 
enemy. Not a gun shot; the bayonet — Sud- 
denly, the call to charge stopped. The bugles called 
" to the Flag!" Instinctively we stopped firing, 
startled. The Marseillaise grew louder, and over 
there, further on, the call to the Flag continued. 
A dead silence — only the Marseillaise and the 
bugle; and we could make out the terrible conflict 
— suddenly the bugle stopped a second time, then at 
full blast they sounded the charge. The flag was 
recaptured. An immense uproar! Our guns re- 
plied all alone, and the Boches that night had to fly 
as fast as their legs could carry them. You who 
think you know the Marseillaise because you have 
heard it played at some prize-distribution, get rid 
of your illusion. To know it, it is necessary to have 
heard it as I have just described it to you, when 
the blood runs, and the flag is in danger. 

" Lettres du Front," par Victor Giraud. Revue des Deux 
Mondes. 



DONALD HANKEY 

Donald Hankey, the author of " A Student in 
Arms," one of the most popular of the war books, 
is an Englishman, who was killed in action on the 
western front in October, 191 6. He wrote his let- 
ters originally for the London Spectator. Mr. 
Strachey, editor of the Spectator, says that after 
reading the book you cannot get away from the con- 
clusion that man, after all, is a noble animal; which 
is contrary to the pacifist assumption, just a little 
insulting, that all men are driven to war as to 
shambles, and are necessarily brutalized by fighting 
for a good cause. 

Donald Hankey was chiefly interested in the great 
democratic experiment of the war, and its lasting 
and beneficial results after the war is over. He 
writes with mixed humor and seriousness and always 
with a warm kindliness. He writes with as much 
affection of " The Cockney Warrior " as of " The 
Beloved Captain," who was not a democrat at all, 
but rather a " justification of aristocracy." On the 
whole, he reserves his best sympathy for the Cock- 
ney. It takes more heroism for the Cockney to be 
a hero than for the Beloved Captain. Tell an Eng- 
lish public school boy of some perilous adventure and 
he will thrill to it and say, " How jolly! " Tell 
the same thing to a boy in the East End of London 
and he will say: " Ow, I'm glad I weren't there! " 
150 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 151 

But when he has been " there " he has generally 
been ready. " A Student in Arms " is a fine tribute 
to the Englishman in arms, from whatever rank. 

{Letter of Donald Hankey) 

For every Englishman who philosophizes, there 
are a hundred who don't. For every soldier who 
prays, there are a thousand who don't. But there 
is hardly a man who will not return from the war 
bigger than when he left home. His language may 
have deteriorated. His " views " on religion and 
morals may have remained unchanged. He may be 
rougher in manner. But it will not be for nothing 
that he has learnt to endure hardship without mak- 
ing a song about it, that he has risked his life for 
righteousness' sake, that he has bound up the wounds 
of his mates, and shared with them his meager ra- 
tions. We who have served in the ranks of " the 
first hundred thousand " will want to remember 
something more than the ingloriousness of war. 
We shall want to remember how adversity made 
men unselfish, and pain found them tender, and dan- 
ger found them brave, and loyalty made them heroic. 
The fighting man is a very ordinary person; that's 
granted ; but he has shown that the ordinary person 
can rise to unexpected heights of generosity and self- 
sacrifice. 

Taken by permission from " A Student in Arms," by 
Donald Hankey. Published by E. P. Dutton & Co. 



FRENCH SCHOOL BOY 

French boys, fine of face, raised by your mothers, 

Who from babyhood had slow and serious growth 

In your large nouses enclosed in leafy gardens. 

Boys religious as I was, from childhood taught 

To assist the priest and help in conducting the mass; 

Older, you left intelligent mother and wise father 

And came to complete in Paris the growth of your spirit. 

You have sense and pleasing manners, politeness and 

warmth; 
Latin and geometry you knew, and combining 
Things respected from childhood and those learned in col- 

lege, 
Religious boys, much troubled by your studies, 
At twenty years strangely you try to reconcile 
Old beliefs with your new uncertainty. 

— Henri Franck, quoted in " Young France and New 
America," by Pierre de Lanux. 

The " defendre Maman " letter is written by a 
French schoolboy to the head of his school. It is 
characteristically French, in the charming intimacy 
it reveals, existing between the " Cher Monsieur 
l'Abbe " and his pupil, in its ardent and high spirit, 
and above all in its pretty Gallic conceit of " de- 
fending Mamma." 

{Letter of French Schoolboy) 

Cher Monsieur l'Abbe: 

Listen to this! I offer myself as an English- 
152 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 153 

German interpreter the second day of the war. 
Knowing how to shoot, to ride horseback, and the 
bicycle and motorcycle, and to drive a car, and do 
fifty kilometers on foot if necessary, I expect to be 
accepted; they refuse me for lack of place. They 
have enough to do with the mobilization, it seems. 

Commines being in danger, I take Mamma to 
England, as well as my little sister. On my return, 
here am I stuck! — You see I should like so much 
to go to the war. I would like to have offered 
myself a second time. Perhaps they would have 
taken me. Jean is at Saint-Astier, where he is in 
training, and I do nothing! Once getting into a 
company, I could have asked to go to the front. It 
would be so fine to make one of those bayonet 
charges that the Germans fear so much, and if nec- 
essary to die — at nineteen — for France ! 

If I do not get in the war, I would never dare to 
show myself again at the school. What would my 
friends say on learning that I had not shared the 
danger, that I have not rushed to " defend 
Mamma," as Regnault said in '70. Oh! how I 
envy those who fight, who are wounded, who die! 
Why in the devil didn't they accept me at once? 
— Cited by " Les Roches " School. 

"La France au-dessus de tout." Lettres de Combattants 
rassemblees et precedees d'une introduction par Raoul 
Narsy, redacteur au Journal des Debats. Paris: Bloud 
et Gay. 



WILLIAM M. BARBER 

In the log book, as it is called, of the American Am- 
bulance service, is a letter written by William M. 
Barber, of Toledo, Ohio, who went to France in 
May, 19 1 6, and was wounded and received the Me- 
daille Militaire. His letter is, we may flatter our- 
selves, characteristically American. It is boyish and 
enthusiastic. Everything is fine. Every one is 
wonderful. The ambulance driver is " a great 
boy." The doctors and the hospital are the best 
in the world. He is very happy, and his " spirits 
are high too" — as we may well believe: 

{Letter of William M. Barber) 

France, June 30, 191 6. 
Dearest "folks at home," abroad — and Grandma! 

. . . My three soldiers were killed. I was hurt 
only a little. I am not disfigured in any way. It 
just tore my side and legs a bit. 

The French treated me wonderfully. I suc- 
ceeded in getting the next American Ambulance 
driven by Wheeler (a great boy) who took me to 

the city of , where our poste is. Here I was 

given first aid, and the Medecin Chef personally 

conducted me in an American Ambulance, in the 

154 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 155 

middle of the night, to a very good hospital. They 
say I have the best doctor in France, in Paris. 

Well, I woke up the next day in bed, and have 
been recuperating ever since. Every one is won- 
derful to me. General Petain, second to Joffre, has 
stopped in to shake hands with me, and congratu- 
late me, too, for above my bed hangs the Medaille 
Militaire, the greatest honor the French can give 
any one. Really, I am proud, although I don't de- 
serve it any more than the rest. Please excuse my 
egotism. 

Mr. Hill and my French lieutenant come to see 
me every day, and some of the boys also. They 
joke around here, saying that I am getting so well 
that they have lost interest in me and must move 
on. In three or four days I go to the hospital at 
Neuilly, where I can have every comfort. 

Of course, you won't worry about me. I will be 
just as good as new soon, and really this is true. 

The Germans peppered the life out of my car. 
No one goes on the road in the daylight, but the 
fellows brought me back the next day a handful of 
bullets taken from it, and said they could get me a 
bushel more if I desired them. 

. . . For three days I was not allowed to eat or 
drink and could hardly move in bed. My spirits 
were high, too. I will try to write better and take 
more pains. . . . 

. . . Well, here I am at Neuilly. This is a won- 



156 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

derful hospital, and they do treat you great! The 
doctors are the best in the world. I am very happy 
here and hope every day that you are as happy and 
never worry about me. I surely have given you a 
lot of trouble and anxiety. . . . The best of my 
experience is that I never once regretted the great 
trip, and I think I have done a small part of a great 
work, and my Medaille shows what the French think 
of my services. . . . 

Good-by, 

William. 

Taken by permission from " Friends of France." Pub- 
lished by Houghton Mifflin & Co. 



VIVE V ALSACE! 

Some young soldiers fight for " Maman," and oth- 
ers for grandmother and grandfather. The latter 
are the descendants of the 500,000 exiles from Al- 
sace and Lorraine. The cynical Bismarck said he 
did not take the provinces for their beaux yeux 
alone. But it is of the beaux yeux of the fair land 
that the young French crusaders seem to think, more 
than of any ore deposits; it is to avenge grand- 
mother and grandfather, and to win back for Ma- 
man her lost patrie. The following anonymous let- 
ter is quoted by M. Ernest Daudet: 

("Vive I 'Alsace" Letter) 

My little mother: 

I am writing to you again to ask for news of 
you. I have already written to you, but I do not 
know if you have received my letter. I am glad 
to have had a little rest to recover my strength. 

For we are departing for . I am going to see 

again my native village, tread the soil of my second 
country. I shall avenge grandmother and grand- 
father, and I shall kill as many Prussians as possi- 
ble. I have already killed my share, but it is not 
yet enough. Finally, it is necessary to hope that our 
157 



158 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

dear Alsace, your country, will return to us, and 
that it is I, your son, who will contribute a little 
towards its recovery. 

I have already had many comrades, true friends, 
killed at my side. I have only been wounded in 
the arm. I am lucky. I have absolute confidence 
that I shall see you again, for I have a lucky star 
that shines over me. 

Little mother, do not worry. If you could only 
hear how the cannon thunder! One sings in order 
to deaden the dreadful noise. Never has my tenor 
voice served me so well. At the* sound of the 
charge, there are no longer men ; there are specters. 
Half fall dead with their horses. One mounts the 
other horses, and it is all the time like that. The 
firing is terrible, but one pays no attention to it. 
In the morning, one is a brother in arms; in the 
evening, one mounts the phantoms in order to rush 
upon the enemy. Finally, have confidence, and in 
a near victory. And vive la France! And vive 
1' Alsace ! which will soon be French. 

" L'Ame franchise et allemande." Introduction par M. 
Ernest Daudet. Paris: Attinger Freres. 



MAURICE GENEVOIX 

Maurice Genevoix was a second-year student in 
the Ecole Normale in Paris in 191 4. He had just 
completed a " study on Maupassant," and was look- 
ing forward to his holidays. Within a month, he 
was at the front, and had received his baptism of fire 
in the Battle of the Marne. His day by day record 
of his experiences gives a vivid, impressionistic, cine- 
matographic picture of modern warfare. The au- 
thor of " Under Fire " might have gone to his young 
countryman for some of his masterly pages; but 
hardly for the human, kindly portrait of the poilu. 

{Letter of Maurice Genevoix) 

Several times I walked up and down, passing and 
repassing soldiers still hustling one another in their 
endeavors to read the announcements. Strangely 
alike in appearance were they. The faces of one 
and all were mud-stained and bristles filled the hol- 
lows of their cheeks. Their blue great-coats bore 
traces of the dust of the road, of the mud of the 
fields, of the heavy rain; their boots and gaiters had 
long since acquired a permanently somber color; 
their clothes were worn and torn, at knees and el- 
bows, and from their tattered sleeves protruded 
159 



160 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

hands incredibly dirty and hardened. Most of them 
appeared wearied and wretched beyond description. 
Nevertheless, these were the men who had just 
fought with superhuman energy, who had proved 
themselves stronger than German bullets and bayo- 
nets; these men were the conquerors. . . . 

To-morrow perhaps they must once again take up 
their knapsacks, and go marching for hours, despite 
feet that swell and burn ; sleep beside ditches full of 
water, eating only when occasion presents, knowing 
hunger sometimes and thirst and coldness. They 
will go on, and among them not one will be found 
to grumble at the life before them. And when the 
hour sounds to fight once again, they will shoulder 
their rifles with the same easy indifference, will rush 
forward as eagerly between the bursts of enemy fire, 
will display the same tenacity before the mightiest 
efforts of the enemy. For in them dwell souls, ever 
scornful of weakness, strengthened and fortified by 
the conviction of victory, capable of conquering 
physical pain and weariness. Oh, all of you, my 
brothers in arms, we are going to do still better 
than we have already done, are we not? 

" 'Neath Verdun," by Maurice Genevoix, with a preface 
by Ernest Lavisse. Translated by H. Grahame Richards. 
London: Hutchinson & Co. 



R. DERBY HOLMES 

Corporal R. Derby Holmes is a Yankee. He en- 
listed with the British army early in 191 6. He 
went over on a horse boat. He saw some hard 
fighting, had some harrowing experiences, and re- 
ceived his Blighty. But all the suffering and all the 
experiences are as nothing, he says, compared with 
" the satisfaction of having done a bit in the great 
and just cause." 

Corporal Holmes describes one of the ugliest inci- 
dents of the war, an incident which is said to explain 
the particular ferocity of the Canadians. Most sto- 
ries of crucifixions are second-hand. But this Yan- 
kee's is direct. He prefaces his story by telling of 
a Canadian he encountered one night when crawl- 
ing around on patrol in No Man's Land. They lay 
together in the mud for a time and compared notes, 
and then parted — each returning (supposedly) to 
his own trench. A little later, however, Corporal 
Holmes saw the Canadians going over their top. 
There had been no preliminary barrage and appar- 
ently no order to charge: 

{Letter of R. Derby Holmes) 

Well, there they were, going over, as many as 
two hundred of them — growling. . . . They 
swept across No Man's Land and into the Boche 
161 



1 62 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

trench. There was the deuce of a ruckus over there 
for maybe two minutes, and then back they came — 
carrying something. Strangely enough there had 
been no machine-gun fire turned on them as they 
crossed, nor was there as they returned. They had 
cleaned that German trench! And they brought 
back the body of a man — nailed to a rude crucifix. 
The thing was more like a T than a cross. It was 
made of planks, perhaps two by five, and the man 
was spiked on by his hands and feet. Across the 
abdomen he was riddled with bullets, and again 
with another row higher up nearer his chest. The 
man was the sergeant I had talked to earlier in the 
night. What had happened was this: He had, no 
doubt, been taken by a German patrol. Probably 
he had refused to answer questions. Perhaps he 
had insulted an officer. They had crucified him 
and held him up above the parapet. With the first 
light his own comrades had naturally opened up on 
the thing with the Lewises, not knowing what it 
was. When it got lighter, and they recognized the 
hellish thing that had been done to one of their 
men, they went over. Nothing in the world could 
have stopped them. . . . 

The Canadians were reprimanded for going over 
without orders. But they were not punished. For 
their officers went with them — led them. 

Taken by permission from " A Yankee in the Trenches," 
by R. Derby Holmes. Published by Little, Brown & Co. 



ALEXANDER McCLINTOCK 

Alexander McClintock has a Distinguished 
Conduct Medal. The English King visited the 
American in the hospital and thanked him person- 
ally for his part in the engagement on the Somme, 
which left him with twenty-two pieces of shrapnel 
in his leg. For a time it looked as if he would not 
be able to give one interpretation to R. I. P. — rise 
if possible. 

Alexander McClintock is a Kentuckian, and at 
one time was a ball player, and turned to bombs nat- 
urally and even affectionately, and he fought with 
the Canadians in Flanders — a combination hard 
to beat. After the third fight at Ypres, when forty 
per cent, of the Canadians were wiped out, and there 
was a call for three hundred volunteers, Mr. Mc- 
Clintock and a comrade started for headquarters. 
They expected to be received with applause, as he 
mock-heroically says, and to be praised for their 
bravery. But they couldn't even get near enough 
to hand in their names: " The whole battalion had 
gone ahead of us. That was the spirit of the Cana- 
dians." 

(Letter of Alexander McClintock) 

I was informed before my departure (from Eng- 
land) that a commission as lieutenant in the Cana- 
163 



1 64 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

dian forces awaited my return from furlough, and 
I had every intention of going back to accept it. 
But since I got to America, things have happened. 
Now it's the army of Uncle Sam for mine. It's 
going to be a tough game, and a bloody one, and a 
sorrowful one for many. But it's up to us to save 
the issue where it's mostly right on one side and all 
wrong on the other — and I'm glad we're in. I'm 
not willing to quit soldiering now, but will be 
when we get through with this. When we finish 
up with this, there won't be any necessity for sol- 
diering. The world will be free of war for a long, 
long time — and a God's mercy, that. 

Taken by permission from " Best o' Luck," by Alexander 
McClintock. Published by George H. Doran Company. 



ROBERT REASER 

Robert Reaser, the son of an artist, was him- 
self studying art in New York, when he joined 
the ambulance unit formed by the City Club of 
New York, and sailed for France, in July, 191 7. 
Robert is nineteen. He is tall. It is not easy for 
him to hide in shell-holes, and " scared " as he is, he 
says he cannot help " laughing at the way I am 
imitating that well known bird that sticks its head in 
the sand and feels hidden." 

Just before leaving for the front, Robert wrote to 
his parents: " By to-morrow or the next day, at 
least, I expect we shall be at the place we started for 
just three months ago yesterday. You can imagine 
there is a good deal of conjecture as to what things 
will be like, and, of course, we are all laughing and 
1 kidding ' each other, and wondering how we shall 

conduct ourselves under fire. J says that on the 

day after the first shell bursts near the convoy, the 
newspaper of some town in the south of France will 
have the report : ' A number of ambulances were 
reported to have passed through the city at 5:15 
this morning, traveling south. Three wheels are 
known to have been touching the ground.' ,! 

But it is not long before Robert is sending word 
that " Little Brother is having the time of his life! 
165 



1 66 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

I'm actually reveling in driving a bucking Ford over 
the worst shell-swept roads in France, and I guess 
I'm doing it as well as the rest of the crowd." (He 
has been cited for bravery.) In one of his letters 
Robert describes the roads: 

{Letter of Robert Reaser) 

. . . All this time the look of the country was 
changing, from the somewhat green fields and shat- 
tered buildings, gradually to the most utterly deso- 
late stretches of ground that I have ever laid eyes 
on. . . . The roads wind up and down over small 
hills which are moderately steep and whose tops are 
several hundred yards apart, sometimes half a mile. 
And on these hills there is absolutely nothing visi- 
ble except upturned earth and rocks, the latter all 
shattered to tiny pieces — no stumps of trees even 
to break the monotony, and a good share of the time 
not a living thing visible except hundreds of rats 
scampering around over the road. It reminds me 
of the heaps of ashes I've seen after big fires, with- 
out any of the ruins. Of course, on closer view, 
remains of wagons and guns and all the things used 
in making war (even to horses and men) are scat- 
tered around and mixed in with the churned up 
earth. On bright days the middle distances look 
like the pictures of Arizona and New Mexico des- 
erts; the same coloring and shapes in the hills. It 
is always picturesque and romantic, and only grue- 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 167 

some when you stop to think (which I do as little 
as possible) , or when you have to pass an occasional 
disagreeable obstruction in the road. 

Communicated. 



ARTHUR GUY EMPEY 

Sergeant Arthur Guy Empey confesses that 
while he was serving with the British army he was 
more than once punished, put on the Crime Sheet 
as it is called, and generally for " Yankee impu- 
dence." When he first went over to London, and 
a British recruiting officer hailed him: " 1 s'y, myte, 
want to tyke on?" his reply was that he didn't 
know what it was, but he rather thought he would 
take a chance at it. And he did. He had eighteen 
months of it, and there were many times when he 
wished he were safe home again, in the little old 
town back of the Statue of Liberty, in Jersey no less. 
But he saw it through, and then with his blighty 
came back and told us all about it. 

There are doubtless some who think that this 
" impudent Yankee " invented " Over the Top." 
At least he made it a familiar household phrase in 
America ; a phrase that even the cats of the country 
came to know, as Mark Twain said of " Du bist wie 
eine Blume." Sergeant Empey also wrote a Tom- 
my's dictionary, from as original a slant as Dr. Sam 
Johnson's when he defined oats as a food for horses 
and Scotchmen. Many of us were first initiated by 
Empey into the mysteries of " cooties " and 
"blighty" and " dixies " (which must be cleaned 
168 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 169 

with mud!) and much besides; that V. C, for ex- 
ample, stands for "very careless" (with his life), 
and R. I. P. for " rest in pieces." 

Sergeant Empey was responsible for a lot of 
Americans taking a chance at it, and going " over 
the top," if not actually, at least with their money 
and flaming sympathies. His message is earnest: 

(Letter of Arthur Guy Empey) 

After my discharge, and after a stormy trip 
across the Atlantic, one momentous day, in the haze 
of the early dawn I saw the Statue of Liberty loom- 
ing over the port rail, and I wondered if ever again 
I would go " over the top with the best of luck 
and give them hell." 

And even then, though it may seem strange, I 
was really sorry not to be back in the trenches with 
my mates. War is not a pink tea, but in a worth 
while cause like ours, mud, rats, cooties, shells, 
wounds, or death itself, are far outweighed by the 
deep sense of satisfaction felt by the man who does 
his bit 

There is one thing which my experience taught 
me that might help the boy who may have to go. 
It is this — anticipation is far worse than realiza- 
tion. In civil life a man stands in awe of the man 
above him, wonders how he could ever fill his job. 
When the time comes he rises to the occasion, is up 
and at it, and is surprised to find how much more 



170 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

easily than he anticipated he fills his responsibilities. 
It is really so " out there." 

He has nerve for the hardships; the interest of 
the work grips him; he finds relief in the fun and 
comradeship of the trenches, and wins that best sort 
of happiness that comes with duty done. 

Taken by permission from " Over the Top," by Arthur 
Guy Empey« Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. 



" THE GOOD SOLDIER " 

M. Victor Giraud quotes the following letter. It 
was written by a young instructor to his father be- 
fore going into an attack in which he lost his life. 
His name is Milavieille. Wherever the names of 
these heroes are known, they should be written 
down. The letter expresses the spirit of " the good 
soldier," Alan Seeger's " good soldier," for whom 
death holds no terrors. The letter also expresses 
simply and movingly the intimate and friendly rela- 
tions existing between the officers and men, espe- 
cially in the French army; between "my general" 
and his " children." 

(Letter of " The Good Soldier") 

The general arrived this morning. He spoke to 
our men. Against all discipline, our soldiers ap- 
plauded him: "Bravo! my general! We'll get 
them, my general! You can depend upon us!" 
The general, with wet eyes, went away stammering : 
" Au revoir, my children ! Thank you, my chil- 
dren ! " I had tears in my eyes. Oh ! it is fine, 
it is beautiful! And I think that he will be satis- 
fied with us, our general. 

Our men, in spite of forty days of the greatest 
171 



i72 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

strain, have a superb morale. Father, I am calm. 
Before going into action, I shall have complete con- 
trol of myself. If I fall, you can be tranquil; I 
shall have had the death of a good soldier and you 
can think of me with a serene spirit. If I fall, I 
shall fall facing them, without complaint, in full 
consciousness of my strength, of the clearness of my 
mind, of my free will. The war that we are fight- 
ing is worth dying for. 

" Lettres du Front," par Victor Giraud. Revue des Deux 
Mondes. 



" PAGES ACTUELLES " FROM THE 
FRENCH, 

With two " current events " from American 
newspapers 

{Letter of a French mother) 

Sir : Thank you most sincerely for the letter that 
you have been good enough to write me. Thanks 
especially for the pains you have taken to tell me 
with so much delicate consideration the terrible 
news which crushes me. . . . 

In this dreadful calamity, one great consolation 
is left to me. For seventeen years, I have fought 
for my son's life through all sorts of illnesses. I 
was able to rescue him from death only by the most 
constant care. I am very proud to have succeeded 
in saving his life, in order to permit him to die for 
his country. This is my great consolation. 

— Printed in the Paris Temps. 

{Letter of an American mother) 

Allow me, as one who has lived until now an old 
woman, to express to you my thanks and apprecia- 
tion for your many courtesies to me as mother of 
173 



174 "THE GOOD SOLDIER" 

Sergeant-Major William B. Jenkins. I had hoped 
my boy would get his chance in France, but it was 
not to be, so I am as submissive to his death as if he 
had died in the trenches in Europe. 

Please accept my thanks for all your kindness 
and to any of his comrades that were with him in 
his sickness. With a sad heart I dictate these lines, 
but with a quickening pulse and an accelerated being 
I look forward to the day when victory shall come 
to the brave boys who are giving their lives for our 
beloved land. I shall ever love a soldier boy. 
May God's blessing be on you! 

— Posted at Camp Upton, training camp at Yap- 
hank, New York. 

{Farewell of a French Soldier) 

Dear god-father and god-mother: 

I write to you in order not to kill mother whom 
a similar blow would surprise too much. 

I was wounded September 29 at Saint-Hilaire- 
le-Grand. I have two hideous wounds, and I shall 
not last very long. They do not even conceal it 
from me. 

I go without regret, with the consciousness of 
having done my duty. 

Advise my parents, then, the best way you know 
how; tell them not to try to come to Suippes, they 
surely would not be in time. 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER " 175 

Adieu, dear god-father, dear god-mother, dear 
parents, dear cousins, all you whom I loved. 
Vive la France ! 

L. Bouny. 
— Printed in the Paris Temps. 

(Farewell of an American Soldier) 

Mother dear, as we are all ready to go, just wait- 
ing for the word to set us in motion, your old pal 
wants to say adios to you alone. 

We have been good pals, and have liked the same 
things, and now for the time being we are separated, 
but, mother dear, it will only be for a little while 
and I will be back with you again. 

I will try to be a credit to you, I will never be a 
coward to bring disgrace to you. 

Good-by, mother. God keep you safe. 

" Mick " McHenry. 

— Printed in the Des Moines, Iowa, Register and 
Leader. 

"La France au-dessus de tout." Lettres de Combattants 
rassemblees et precedees d'une introduction par Raoul 
Narsy, redacteur au Journal des Debats. Paris: Bloud et 
Gay. 



"THE GOOD SOLDIER" 177 



A LAMENT 

We who are left, how shall we look again 

Happily on the sun, or feel the rain, 

Without remembering how they who went 

Ungrudgingly, and spent 

Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain? 

A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings — 

But we, how shall we turn to little things 

And listen to the birds and winds and streams 

Made holy by their dreams, 

Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things? 

— Wilfrid Gibson. 



THE END 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMEBIOA 



'HE following pages contain advertisements of a 
few of the Macmillan books on kindred subjects. 



Ambulance 464: Encore 
des Blesses 

By JULIEN H. BRYAN 

Illustrated. Cloth, i2mo. 

Here we have the story of the experiences of a Princeton 
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Mr. Bryan had his kodak with him and his text is illus- 
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Filth Avenue Hew York 



Attack 

EDWARD G. D. LIVEING 

With an Introduction by John Masefield 

"The Attack," says Mr. Masefield in his intro- 
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenne New York 



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The Old Front Line 

By JOHN MASEFIELD 

Illustrated. Cloth, i2mo. $1.00 

What Mr. Masefield did for the Gallipoli Campaign, he 
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A War Nurse's Diary 



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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York 



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